Widget Worries

If I were the worrying kind, I'd have plenty of important things to choose from. The province seems hell bent on destroying our environment; I work within a mental health system that often just doesn't seem to "get it"; our family budget for the next few months is well and truly FUBAR. The list could go on and on. After all there is always global warming, war, the spread of HIV/AIDS.

You get my drift.

However, being something of a simple minded soul, I do not worry (well, not all that much) about any of those things, at least not as part of my morning routine.

Instead I spend the very first part of the morning making obeisance to the machines that I count on for good coffee, followed by much too much time checking to see how (or if) my  digital world did over night. I also spend a few moments worrying  about my widgets.

In truth, I'm not sure they are really best described as widgets, but the coffee hasn't kicked in yet, so that's the best I can come up with this morning.

For example, yesterday I was mightily disturbed to find that my last.fm/winamp blog toy seemed to think I had been listening to the same two James Taylor songs over and over again when, in truth, I was on a female jazz singer kick. I was relieved to see that the widget elf has fixed that this AM.

Quick, quick scroll down the page, and if you are reading this shortly after I post, you will see that I am listening to Molly Johnson. If you see Ottmar Liebert there, I have gone to work and the fella has been choosing the music.

Then there is the continuing argument in  my head over the settings for my igoogle themes. Apparently the folks in google-land think it is perfectly OK for Aja Tiger to stay in bed until 9 AM. If I want to time shift it so she wakes up when I do, then I have to pretend I live in the middle of the Atlantic ocean in the morning, and move her back to Alberta later in the day if I want her to do her homework in the late afternoon and go to bed at a reasonable hour.

Such are the weighty issues that occupy my mind in the morning.

 

posted by taming at 05:06 | link | comments (1)|
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Didja Catch the Queen on YouTube?

When I became a Canadian citizen a few months back, I also became a citizen of the Commonwealth. In fact, I had to pledge loyalty to the Queen (though I was amongst the mumblers for that part of the oath).

Initially, I blamed my just-hatched status for my amusement when I found out that the royal family has a YouTube page and that you could listen to the Queen's latest Christmas message there. It was apparently a good move on the part of the royals as about 300,000 people have watched it, and I am guessing that not all of them laughed.

I also watched such stunners at "A Day in the Life of the Prince of Wales" and one called "A Garden Party." It's nice to know that Charles has an interest in how comfortable school uniforms are. I'm not sure if a portion of my taxes go into maintaining the garden, but if I pay for things like that, I'm thinking that opening the gardens up to the public (well, a carefully screened portion of the public) only four times a year is an amazing waste of our money.

When I began this post, I thought I had something clever to say about the Queen, but I don't.  I've heard that she travels with her own toilet seat. I suppose that is amusing, but if I had all that money, I might do that, too. It's probably a whole lot cleaner than the ones in the mall.

She appears to have her own teeth and she continues to go to work each day. Well, not every day, but more often than Dubya. I suppose that is enough. After all, as long as she is with us, it keeps us from having to listen to Charles on Christmas Day.

 

posted by taming at 03:03 | link | comments |
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The Joy of Life Long Learning

Like most people, I possess a surprising amount of knowledge in one or two areas, and know almost nothing in others. For example, I can pretty well hit a profile for roasting a new coffee bean spot on, based solely on my previous experience, and I am pretty much clueless about screwdrivers with odd looking heads.

I believe I may have outdone myself in the "I know nothing. Nothing." category yesterday.

It was about 5 PM when one of my clients called to ask me if she had left her wallet in my car. This time of year, it is pitch dark by then. My initial inclination was to tell her that I would check in the morning, after sunrise, but somehow it occurred to me that my car probably had a light mounted somewhere on the ceiling. Now, in all fairness, I have only had this car for about 10 years, and in my 35 or so years of driving, I really hadn't had the need to explore the finer points of car design.

In any case, as I was sitting in my car when the call came in, I looked up and saw a couple of things that might have been lights. My first go at it opened the moon roof. Unfortunately, the light from the moon was not bright enough to solve the problem. I then noticed another protuberance, further back.

Yes, my car really does have lights on the inside. And yes, when I hit the switch, I could see my client's wallet sitting on the dashboard. I could even see the snow that had made its way into the car during the moon roof experiment.   

I grabbed the wallet, turned off the light, and left the car. It was then that I noticed something very, very special. Not only does my car have what I now know is called a cabin light, but, apparently, this very special car has a cabin light that, with the switch in the right position, goes on when one opens the doors and stay on for a minute or two after the door is closed. Imagine that!

I ran up to my client's apartment to return her wallet, sped through the remainder of my work day, and then triumphantly returned home to share my big news.

He laughed.

It wasn't just a little giggle, either. It was a huge, thigh slapping, belly laugh, accompanied by what I call "the look". I'm pretty sure every married woman knows the look. It is the expression men get on their faces when they think that their wives look cute as a button when they are being really dumb.

Thanks to the guy with the look, I now know that every car made in North America for the past gazillion years has this feature. I will stow that information away in the place in my brain that stores other newly acquired bits of arcane knowledge.

Who knows, if I keep learning all this important stuff, I might some day be awarded an honorary penis. I'm not sure what I would do with it, but I suppose I could keep it in the tool box next to the screwdriver with the star shaped head.

That's called a Torx, yanno.

 

posted by taming at 04:08 | link | comments (4)|
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Nothing Here. Nada. Zip. Nothing At All.

I am not blogging today  because I have to pick someone up at detox before 7 AM and get him to the lab for a glucose tolerance test.

If I were going to blog, it would be about the millionaire New Jersey couple found guilty of enslaving two Indonesian women they brought to their mansion to work as housekeepers. 

From The Toronto Star:

 The Sabhnanis' defense attorneys contended the two women concocted the story of abuse as a way of escaping the house for more lucrative opportunities. They argued the housekeepers practiced witchcraft and may have abused themselves as part of an Indonesian self-mutilation ritual. They also said the couple went on frequent vacations that would have given the two women ample opportunity to flee.

Or mebbe I would just go on and on about today's coffee. I do that.

 

posted by taming at 04:16 | link | comments |
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It's Coffee and the NY Times

The NY Times Sunday Book Review doesn't usually feed my coffee obsession, but it did yesterday, with a review of Taylor Clark's Starbucked. The author of the review , PJ O'Rourke, doesn't say all that much about the book itself, but does manage to quote from it occasionally. My fav?

Clark quotes a 1997 Larry King interview with Howard Schultz, the company’s chairman, where Schultz outlines what should have been the plot of Clark’s book:

“People weren’t drinking coffee. ... So the question is, How could a company create retail stores where coffee was not previously sold, ... charge three times more for it than the local doughnut shop, put Italian names on it that no one can pronounce, and then have six million customers a week coming through the stores?”

I'm drinking Sumatra Blue Batak "Tarbarita" Peaberry this AM, roasted over the weekend in my bread machine to a city+. I'm guessing the folks lined up at Starbucks would be mightily perplexed by a coffee like this.

That's fine. Starbucks' disdain leaves more of this great bean available for me and my friends. 

 

posted by taming at 04:20 | link | comments (4)|
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