Working by the basement breakroom.  The news is always on the television, no one is watching.  The empty voices bounce off the cracked and peeling paint in a near whisper.

Suddenly, I hear a faint voice I recognize.  I wonder out loud, “Is that Neil deGrasse Tyson?”  A quick look around the corner confirms that it is indeed him.

The four men I am working with ask, “So who’s that?”  Before I think I answer, “Astrophysicist”.

Apparently, recognizing the voice of an astrophysicist from the next room is enough of a geek moment to put you out of the “cool circle” at work.

I’m okay with that…

The three of us were out to dinner.  ”Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” was playing quietly in the background.  During a lull in the conversation I look up at my wife and daughter and say, “I’ve never really liked U2.”

The hurt look on their faces still haunts me in my sleep…

I saw the trailer for “Red Tails”.  I’m interested for the first few seconds but then they lost me.

I’m not sure if this is a remake of “The Tuskegee Airmen” (which I liked) or a sequel or if this is something new.  But when the trailer used modern electronica music over the WWII dogfight scenes… I stopped wanting to know.

I know this isn’t the first (or last) time I’ve seen modern music used anachronistically in a trailer for a period piece, but it was the most jarring.  It may have its purpose, drawing in young kids or something, but it turned me off in a major way…

Spelling things backward, the favorite name generator of the unimaginative D&D player…  But I just learned of one I missed: Doc Brown from the “Back to the Future” movies.

Emmet Lathrop Brown

Emmet Lathrop

Temme Porhtal

Time Portal

Watched a show last night about the Nereus and the dive to Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench.  I love shows about deep ocean dives and what we don’t know about our planet…

But at one point during the descent the narrator said, “More vehicles have reached the surface of Mars than have reached the ocean floor.”

I know what they meant, but I think they may want to clarify this statement…

.

BTW, If I was one of the two men in the Trieste and the other guy insisted on completing the dive after the plexiglass shattered, there would only have been one man coming up alive because at that point, it’s a fight to the death as I try to surface.  Were they braver than I am or just stupid?  Or possibly, they knew more about their own craft than I learned by reading a single Wikipedia article…

Of course, I’m not a doctor (unless you count witch doctor)…

I’ll never know the real pain and heartbreak of a doctor/nurse having to tell a patient’s family that their loved one isn’t going to make it.  But every time I tell an agent that their Hard Drive is dead and needs to be replaced, I get to feel a little like a doctor:

Detached yet sympathetic and in the end I have to think to myself, hey, fuck ‘em!  They should have backed up their files more often than “that one time three years ago!”

Had a Waffle waitress pull up her shirt and pull down her jeans to show us the tattoo in her butt crack.  Five minutes later she made a quote from “Scarface” (but not the “Say hello to my little friend” line).  She kept verbally abusing us and telling us stories you’d never hear in a “real” restaurant.

We gave her a $10 tip on a $24 check…

Can this day get any better?

One must maintain composure and remain calm during combat;

otherwise the dice get thrown all over the table…

For a long time I’ve wanted to run nine months of blog posts and only post them on dates that would fill the calendar grid in patterns like the dungeon levels from The Legend of Zelda.  I’d even make references between posts on certain dates where there were tunnels connecting distant screens in the game.

I get excited about things like this for about three minutes at a time.

Government Asset Tags are tamper-proof barcode stickers that are critical to tracking and identifying essential government property.  If you try to peel or scrape them off they disintegrate, making it impossible to swap stickers from one piece of gear to another.

I can understand that placing these on all the computers may have been a good idea.

Placing the computer’s Asset Tag on the REMOVABLE and interchangeable door was decidedly NOT such a great idea!