Just took an extended lunch break to add a page for This is Jinsy to TV Tropes only to have TV Tropes eat it.
Dagnabit!
(Later: Went back and redid it this evening. Behold its majesty!)
Meanwhile, in Westeros
Finished A Dance with Dragons this morning, which brings me totally up to date with A Song of Ice and Fire. I hope Jon is alive, but I won’t be holding my breath.
Guess I should watch the TV series now…
Currently Making my Life Hell…
Imagine, if you will, that you’re a mechanic. Not the world’s greatest mechanic by any means, but a decent mechanic who earns a decent wage fixing and tuning cars and trucks.
One day you get a call from someone wanting you to come out and tune up their car. So you hop in your van and drive out to their address. On arrival however you discover that it’s not a car.
It’s this….
Before you have time to react, the Captain whacks a hat on your head, says “Welcome aboard! You’re our new Head Engineer!” and drags you down to the engine room.
Which looks like this…
Mistaking your look of horror for one of mere concern, the captain says “Don’t worry, the manuals are right here…”
You pick up one of the decaying books at random and open it. Every single page looks like this…
The Captain continues “All set? Your tools are over there…”
“…and we think the forward port engine is about to fall off. Have fun!”
Through strenuous effort (and a lot of desperate banging on random pipes) you manage to keep the ship in the air. You even manage to accommodate some of the crew’s requests, such as restoring the air conditioning and halting the gradual detachment of the starboard mess hall. Buoyed by your apparent competence the crew send in a flood of new requests for things such as hot tubs and mood lighting, some of which you can manage and many of which you have to ignore.
Making matters worse, through all of this the Captain insists on a weekly meeting at Airship HQ in Zurich. Once a week you have to fly to Zurich and sit in a small room staring at a list of requests and upgrades. After about an hour the meeting is declared a success and you fly back to the airship to continue banging on pipes.
You find yourself entertaining thoughts of sabotaging the engines, or at least ignoring the more desperate maintenance tasks so the ship will fall out of the sky and (as long as you survive) you won’t have to deal with it any more. But your professionalism wins through, you take a deep breath and get on with tightening a valve that you think will correct the water pressure on deck three. Maybe.
Attention Ladies and Gentlemen
This is what happens when you don’t close your tags.
That is all.
Down at the Office…
Coworker: Ruby 2’s out!
Me: Wasn’t that a Stones song?
Meanwhile in Rome…
Sometimes the mind comes up with something that one knows is awful, but nonetheless must be created and shared – because it’s the only way to get it out of one’s head. With that in mind, I present this abomination…
I’m so, so sorry.
On Spiegeltents
People will tell you that ‘spiegel’ is Dutch for ‘mirror’, and a spiegeltent is hence called because of the mirrors used to decorate it. This is untrue.
A spiegel is a cross between a spaniel and a beagle. The breed was developed in Belgium in the late 19th century and became famous for its ease of training and ability to howl in tune. Choirs of spiegels toured Europe in tents and these ‘singing dogs’ were a major attraction of the age.
Spiegel choirs fell out a favour during the rise of fascism in the 1930s, and the last of the touring companies folded at the start of the second world war. Today only the tents remain.
(Went to the Perth Fringe Festival last night with Rebecca. We ended up seeing Face the Music, which was fantastic – highly recomended. We also saw the Spiegeltent, but without the dogs we judged it not worth paying to go in…)
Meanwhile, at Adobe…
Maybe if I say ‘Creative Cloud’ enough people will stop asking me these awkward pricing questions…
Dachshund Antibiotics II
About this time last year, while recovering from a badly failed holiday and probable scrub typhus, I made a post titled ‘Dachshund Antibiotics’. This was a somewhat lame pun based on the fact that I had been put on doxycycline for the typhus, and ‘doxie’ is American slang for dachshund. “Doxie-cycline” therefore equals “dachshund-antibiotics”. See?
(I said it was somewhat lame…)
In any case, my blog is apparently now quite popular among people looking for antibiotics to give to their wiener dogs – I get several of them a week in my referrer stats. Not an anticipated consequence of my pun, but an interesting one.
Anyway the reason I bring all this up is that I’m back on the doxies as a result of a case of bronchitis which has resisted two rounds of amoxicillin, even when supplemented with super-duper clavulanic acid (guaranteed to kill the trickiest of amoxicillin resistant bacteria!). I feel like hell, am coughing like an infant at a homeopathic vaccination clinic and am only at work today because we’re in the middle of a heatwave and the office has better aircon that my apartment.
Hopefully the doxycycline will cut in before my skin combusts.
Paging Saint Malachy
Well, assuming I’m not delirious (my bronchitis has returned with a vengeance) Pope Benny is going to retire at the end of the month. Time to return to the Prophecies of Saint Malachy!
In the extreme persecution of the Holy Roman Church, there will sit Peter the Roman, who will nourish the sheep in many tribulations; when they are finished, the city of seven hills will be destroyed, and the dreadful judge will judge the people. The End.
Well, that’s cheerful…
(For my previous take on St Malachy back in 2005 see here and here)