All posts by djones

friday high five

The Ugly Pain of …

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It’s Friday and thus time for

Five Clothing Scale Errors That Drive Me Crazy

As most of you know, I am not a tiny person – in fact not even normal size. Last I checked, I’m still about 6’5″ and 300+ lbs. That means I don’t buy clothing in the aisles of WalMart or Target. Clothing meant for us monsters is readily available elsewhere, but, and it is a big but, manufacturers don’t make big clothing by doing a “fit the person” remodel. No, they simply take the pattern used for little people clothing and scale it so the some one measurement is in the ball park. The problem is that people generally don’t scale linearly as they grow. Some are tall and thin, some are short and round, some have long torsos and short legs while others have long legs and short torsos, etc. Then there are people like me. I have the classic beer barrel on short stilts with gorilla arms and a bowling ball head build – and no neck. I’m serious, it seems that my chin is directly attached to my chest. Thus the topic of my Friday High Five this week. (Although it might better be titled Friday Low Five or Five Rants for Friday this week.)

  • Pockets do not scale well. I have shirts that I could easily carry a midget in the pocket. Same goes for the back pockets on pants.

  • Collars on shirts are too tall. When you have no neck, a collar can feel like a steel neck ring. Especially when it was scaled to a height to match the 20 inch non-neck scaling.

  • Long sleeves are not. I have exactly one long sleeved shirt. Unfortunately, I do have a number of 3/4 sleeve shirts that were purchased as long sleeved shirts.

  • Hats are just plain hard to find for people with big heads. (I heard that – it has nothing to do with egomania!)  With a 9 3/4 inch hat size, I can prove one size dosn’t fit all.

  • And finally, the capstone of my litany of scale ills: manufacturers chintz out and use a standard length zipper on pants. Which means that get to “that certain part of the male anatomy”, one has to pull the pants down because the zipper ends closer to the belly button than the crotch. ‘Nuff said.
mama kat, writer's challenge

Hi, my name is Dan and …

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Time once again for Mama Kat’s Writer’s Challenge. This week the prompts are:

1.) What will you be doing now that the kids are back in school?
(inspired by Michelle from Honest And Truly)

2.) Things I have learned from my toddler.
(Inspired by Big Mama Cass from The World Through My Eyes).

3.) What would you put in your favorite things giveaway?
(inspired by Jill from Scary Mommy who is having a favorite things giveaway right NOW! Check it out!!)

4.) Hi, my name is ______ and I am a _______.
(inspired by Emmy from Emmy Mom One Day At A Time.)

5.) If these walls could talk…
(inspired by JennyMac from Let’s Have A Cocktail)

So without further ado, here we go!

#1 – Given that the Son has been out of the house for a few years, I’ll be doing the same things i was doing before school started! So I’ll just have to look forward to the stories of escape from all the bloggers with young ones still at home.

#2 – One thing I learned (from a friend of the Son, not the Son) is that tykes can be both talented and obsessive. One day when the friend was over and the two of them were playing, I heard the ominous sounds of silence coming down the hall. When I went to investigate, I discovered the friend with a screw-driver of unknown origin taking the plates off the electrical plugs. I would have sworn they were too young to do that. We had the plug caps installed and the little guy didn’t even bother with the caps and went straight for removing the plate. Turned out he had gotten in trouble for that particular act at home before trying it here. So there were several lessons there: 1) Never let ’em out of your sight, 2) Pay attention to the sudden appearance of silence, and 3) Check with the parents of playmates as to what they have been doing wrong at home *before* they come to spend the afternoon.

#3 – Being the nerd that I am, it would have to include computer arcana. I have a still operational TRS-80 calculator from 1980, a precursor of the notebook computer in that it is a cross between a scientific calculator and low capability computer. Mass storage via a cassette tape interface to a cheap handheld tape unit. Capable of running 100 line programs in Basic. Runs only on 4 mercury watch batteries, no AC power interface. Heck, I might even throw in one of my handcrafted multi-player space opera games I wrote for the beast back in 1981. That was a step up from the calculator games I wrote in the late 70’s to sell to my fellow grad students since we all had similar calculators. {*grin*} Keep in mind that this is from a time before the IBM PC was even a gleam in anyone’s eye. Here is the beast in all it’s glory:

Up until a few years ago, I could also have included one of the first 100 HP LaserJet II’s ever made. But I already gave that away, so ..

In other areas, I’d have to include some works from my library. Maybe the collected works of Robert Heinlein or Harlan Ellison. Maybe even some of the rare short stories from the 50’s that are so hard to find now.

And food, I have to give away some food. Maybe a few zucchini. It is that time of year in the garden belt where anyone not guarding their door finds random bags of zucchini on their door step. (Someday I’ll have to write up my zucchini spaghetti sauce – it is so good that we freeze zucchini to put in it all winter.)

#4 – Hi, my name is Dan and I am a Computer Whisperer! My deep, dark, and dirty secret that drives people crazy is that I am the Computer Whisperer. I can walk up to any computer, think a few good thoughts, say the appropriate words, and viola – everything starts working just fine.

If the computer has been freezing up on you for days, all I have to do is walk into the room and it behaves perfectly.

If you haven’t been able to get that web site to accept your input and have resorted to sitting on hold for hours in the hope of getting through to customer support – just let me sit down at the keyboard and all will suddenly work and your order will be complete in seconds.

If you’ve been trying to get your printer to power on and/or unjam – let me caress it and it will work like a charm.

You keep getting the BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) – let me just touch the keyboard and the machine will run perfectly for hours.

In and of itself, being a Computer Whisperer is not calculated to drive people crazy. It is more calculated to make you really popular late at night around deadlines. The real issue is that people have been getting strange and irreproducible results for hours and have drug in other people to verify that it isn’t working and I walk in and it starts working. You can see how that might rankle a bit. I have had my wife insist on other people coming over to see that her computer isn’t working right because she knows when I walk in it will start working perfectly. And perhaps more annoying, all those vexed people know that as soon as I walk out of the room, their troubles will resume until I return. A good computer only responds to a Computer Whisperer it can hear and see.

The worst part is that I don’t even have to know anything about the computer in question. I have been at sites with main frames down and waiting for the system engineers to arrive, walked into the computer room, and suddenly all is working again. Back in the early days of programmable calculators, my fellow graduate students used to come to my office so that their “broken” calculators would work long enough to finish the assignment. When I was at a national lab, I had a colleague that would drag me over to his area at lunch time just so his computer powered detector would work. (I got a lot of free lunches that way.) It’s probably good I never became a system engineer – it’s hard to repair that which works while you are there and then quits when you leave!

#5 – If these walls could talk, they’d talk of many things from the past. The house was built in 1961; we are only the second owners. And of course like any small town, we know the first owners. Not only know, but went to school with some of their kids and the male half of the couple is my ophthalmologist.

I have already heard the garage whisper about the time their son (also named Dan) came home a little uncertain behind the wheel and perhaps a bit under the influence and forgot the brakes. That is why the wall between the garage and the back porch looks a little bit newer than its other cousins.

I have also heard the wiring talk a bit about the winter power paranoia of the original owners. There is a hulking switch on the back porch that with a single flick could disconnect from the grid and connect to the diesel generator in the garage. When we converted the house from all electric (it was a Medallion All-Electric showplace when built), the connections to the switch and the generator itself went the way of the dodo bird. In its loneliness, the switch whispers sad stories of outages past.

The family room is big enough to host a small basketball tourney, but that is nothing compared to the 40+ tons of rocks under it. The now removed early solar heating system used them as a heat reservoir. The theory was to gather heat in the rocks all summer by collecting on the roof and then blowing the superheated air through the rocks to store the energy. One was then to blow air from the house through the rocks in winter to extract heat. Unfortunately, the company that made the system never got them to work properly before they faded from existence. So hot air was indeed blown into the rocks in the summer. But, it then leaked into the family room, making it too hot to sit in even with the air conditioning running. Then in the winter, the rock quickly cooled and spent the winter effectively cooling the room. Needless to say, that was one of the systems we first pulled out when we bought the house. Now all we hear are whispers of the long gone solar panels on the roof and the ever running fans in the rocks. The rocks themselves just sit and hunker in silence beneath the family room floor, hoping against hope that someday they will be useful once more.

Finally, there is my bathroom. We remodeled it a few years ago. Out went the pastel green tub and sinks and all the stories they could tell. In came the nice white. Out went the standard size cabinetry and in came the custom stuff that is 6 inches taller that standard. I can finally wash my face and shave without feeling like my head is between my knees. I can comb my hair without stooping. And the tile is laid in a pleasing mathematical pattern of my own devising. But the tile has whispered to me that some family members think the tile and pattern is more suitable to a Tijuana house of ill repute than to a sedate bathroom. Too bad – the tile and I have attained oneness. We have no desire to separated.

knowledge, nova, pbs

Semi-morbid Tuesday

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The other day I happened to watch an episode of Nova on PBS and heard a brief discussion of how some people cannot stand not to know something while others resolutely do not want to know somethings. The discussion on Nova came up in the context of genetic testing – did people want to know if they carried a high risk gene versus not wanting to know.

I have a hard time with the not wanting to know idea since I am definitely a “I want to know!” type of guy. In discussions with friends, some have expressed the “I absolutely don’t want to know!” sentiment. I cannot understand why anyone would not want to know. I guess that is because I am one of those people that feels a need to know about everything. One definition of what it is to be human claims that the crucial distinguishing characteristic of humans is the ability to spot patterns and plan accordingly. Not wanting to know seems a bit un-human in this light. In addition, I can make a simple logical case for wanting to knowing. Thus it would seem that the people who desire not to know must be illogical, un-human,  or basing the decision on emotion. I suspect it is emotion.

As a concrete example, suppose that one had the gene for Huntington’s Disease. In spite of the fact that it is incurable and fatal in the long term, I’d want to know if I had it. I could then plan ahead to have various things in order. I could also avoid putting off doing things until later, like the proverbial “we’ll travel a lot after we retire.” It just seems that one could plan to re-order the normal activities and priorities of life to account for the changes in time-line and abilities in the final stages.

One of my friends made a strong case for not knowing in his case. His point was that since the end is so debilitating and involves losing so much of what he viewed as important for a desirable quality of life, once he knew he had it, he would have a very hard time not ending his life early in order to avoid the spiraling path of debilitation. I’m not sure whether I’d classify that as not wanting to know or if it was a case of not being able to handle the consequences of knowing in a manner that made him happy.

In any case, my question for the day is whether you want to know or not? Can you articulate why you feel the way you do? Would the severity of the end stages affect your desire to know/not know?

football, weather

Cool at last …

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Cool at last, cool at last, good gosh almighty, cool at last  … (with apologies to Dr. Martin Luther King for paraphrasing and parodying)

Last night we got more rain, making a total of an inch and a half over two days. Understand that we normally get less that 12-14 inches a year our here. June was one of the wettest Junes on record here. July was pretty wet as well. August is getting up there now too. But that has nothing to do with today’s topic per se. The key is that the rains have been cold and so cooled it off. Today it barely got above 70 and after all the days in the 80-105 range, it is a real cause for celebration.

My friend T calls this time of year (although normally in September) when the nights get cool and the days are comfortably nice as “sleeping weather.” The days are perfect for getting things done; you feel energized with the ebbing of the heat. And the nights, oh my gosh the nights! They cool off and you can sleep the sleep of the dead and finally even use a *blanket*.

As you might guess, this is one of my favorite times of year. It signals the end of the drear heat of summer, but announces the beauty of the Indian summer that is now at hand. Maybe I am too close to the patterns of the weather, but I love the changes as the seasons pass. I especially love this season because it is associated in my mind with the start of football. The agony of practices and the joy of games, all of it. And it also means that we have only a while before frost  followed by real cold weather arrives

So what season is your favorite?

(L is still home and her brother and family are here visiting from Connecticut. L’s niece is preparing to head off to college in a few weeks and it’s fun to hear that excitement from a youngster. It’s also clear that girls and boys look at the process and what is important very differently. Boys seem to be concerned with who has the stereo and who has the xbox and … Girls seem to worry about things that most boys don’t think about – like what color themes for the room and which roomie is bring the iron and … 

Life will be returning to normal tomorrow and maybe I’ll even have a longer post. {*grin*})

odd question of the day

Odd Question of the Day

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The odd question of the day for this Sunday evening is a simple one: do you ever find yourself wondering who the people are that appear and disappear from your followers list and/or feedburner subscribers? I know I do. It seems that at random times people disappear from the followers panel. In most cases, I have no clue who just dropped out. It seems that blogger ought to have log that the blog owner could consult to see who arrived and who left in a given time span for the follow list and the feed list.

Why you might ask? Well, I am one of those people that believes that if someone follows me, I should follow them if there is any easy way to do so on their blog. So it is really convenient to know who just signed on as a follower and especially which of the myriad of blogs listed in their profile is the one I should follow for maximum return on my reading time. (Admittedly, I can usually get a clue by looking at the last published dates on each of their blogs, but sometimes even that fails.) I can usually muddle through with the current information on this side of the follow issue, so I can’t get too wound up about it.

But, and it is a big but, I have no idea who it was when someone stops following or drops the feed. And that is irksome to me for two reasons: 1) I don’t know who to un-follow. {*grin*} and 2) I don’t know if it was a long time reader who might have important words for me about why they exited (versus a fly-by follower that came on a whim and left the same way). It’s not like this is a mega-blog with 500 followers. This is a small comfy blog that I as the author feel some connection with most of the readers. So when I notice that someone has headed off, I wonder who and why. Especially when in one case I know it was the same person following and then un-following every other day. That kind of pattern often makes me think that someone is doing a classroom experiment for a social studies class. {*grin/2*}

So I will leave you with two questions. Do you notice the follow and feed fluctuations on your blog? Or do you blithely ignore them? Inquiring minds want to know.