Inklings

Category: observations

  • Tee Ball

    I always thought the game of baseball was exciting. Why does this not seem to be the case with six and seven-year old tee ball? Most of the poor kids, if not completely oblivious to what’s going on around them, seem genuinely bored with the game. Granted the hitting and fielding are certainly on the modest side of paltry but there are things to watch for. It would seem that most infielders are captivated by just how much limestone they can kick up from the baselines before being reprimanded. In fact, I witnessed my youngest filling his glove with the golden dust so that he could hurl it at those opponents that ran by him at short stop. I’m pretty sure that skill wasn’t covered in practice.

  • Tattoos

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    It would seem that everyone these days has some ‘ink’ on their body. I have nothing against anyone (or anyone’s grandma for that matter) that does but I personally don’t think I could ever commit to it. I simply can’t imagine anything that I would want permanently stamped on my body for the rest of my life. I can barely do a drawing without thinking of ways to improve or change it just minutes after finishing it.

    I think it’s just the nature of artists and designers to always want to perfect their creations and it’s for this reason that I have problems designing tattoos for others. I wonder if those that get them don’t experience this to some degree. Maybe that’s why I’ve been told that once you get a tattoo that it’s addicting and you have to get another. Trust me, if I had tattooed my first personal logo onto my arm twenty years ago, I can guarantee that I’d have the itch to get another – if only to perfect or improve on the terrible one that I would now have.

    Sorry, but I have no desire to spend my twilight years in some retirement home poignantly explaining to fellow residents what each of my tattoos mean. I’ll stick to sharing my art on paper, thank you very much.

  • Random Memories

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    I realize I’m putting myself out there as a computer geek with this post, so for those of you not inclined to talk megs and gigs, I apologize. Over the past 20 years I’ve relied on a great many forms of saving digital work. The true 5.25″ ‘floppy’ disk dates back to my junior year in high school and I’m glad to say that’s where it ended. Entrusting anything that flimsy to hold your essential files seemed far too risky. I would equate it to stuffing a vinyl 45 in your backpack with a bunch of heavy text books.

    Things got some better with the 3.5″ floppy diskette. It was no longer floppy and a lot smaller plus a double density disk could hold up to ten times the data. I still have a ten-pack of floppies that I bought in college for one of my classes. They were obsolete before I got a chance to use them all.

    My foray into the world of graphics required a need for more robust storage. One of the earliest forms I recall was something known as the SyQuest disk. You needed a special drive that actually had to ramp up speed before the disk was read. The clear case and size made it seem like an 8-track after dealing with floppy disks for so long. They weren’t reliable and from time to time you lost information.

    The successor to the SyQuest was the Magneto Optical disk. These looked like two floppy diskettes sandwiched on top of each other but again, required special drives. Offering sizes up to 640MB these little wonders were a mainstay for temporary data storage. Not unlike the SyQuest, these too, began to offer spotty performance and after losing some really big jobs we abandoned them all together.

    Iomega offered their own brand of MO disk which was highly successful. So much so, that every computer began offering an internal zip drive as a standard feature. They were certainly more reliable than their predecessors and I found myself having to upgrade to a 750 MB drive to keep up with some of my clients. Unfortunately, the days of zip were numbered as well.

    With CD storage still a standard, the CD-RW became more popular as the drives came down in price. Soon computers offered CD-RW drives as standard features. Once DVDs hit the market, the appeal of CDs wore thin. With 4.7 GB of storage in the same physical size, how could one go wrong. One of my early Macs had a special DVD-RW drive that would burn rewritable DVDs. Though expensive, they were a great way to economize the amount of space needed to store data.

    The USB thumb drives are the latest craze in small, portable rewritable data storage. I remember when a 2 GB USB thumb drive cost $180 (I once had a 2 GB hard drive computer back in ’97 and thought it was HUGE!). Now you can get a 16 GB drive for $45!

    I wonder what the future of data storage will bring. All I know is if it gets any smaller we won’t be able to see it to plug it in!

  • Wait Math

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    If you’ve ever gone out for dinner on a busy Saturday night you’ve most likely experienced ‘wait math.’ You approach the host station and deliver your party size and name to the cheery young hostess who quickly jots all of it down on her ‘official’ clipboard spreadsheet. Based on how you’re standing shoulder-to-shoulder with other hungry patrons, said hostess anticipates your next question like a mind-reader. After a few seconds of ‘wait math’ she delivers the answer: ‘it’ll be about a 35 minute wait.’ The skilled hostess is able to utter this phrase in such an impartial tone that you’re not sure if she’s trying to dissuade or encourage you to stay.

    I was never privy to the secret ‘wait math’ formula when I worked as a bus boy in the food service sector, but there has to be some constants that make it a bit more than an educated guess. How do they come up with the final answer? Most of the time the formula is quite reliable in delivering an accurate time, but for some reason tonight it failed miserably. It’s like our hostess didn’t study enough. Either that or she was hoping to get the answer from a co-host. Maybe she just forgot to carry the one because her original answer of thirty five minutes was more like an hour and thirty five minutes. Hey, I understand you’re busy but you can’t afford to be messing up ‘wait math’ when you have customers with two hungry children. They might start eating the furniture or, worse yet, each other.

    One thing’s for sure – regardless of how deficient a host or hostess’ ‘wait math’ skills may be, and how lousy the service or food ends as a result, they always manage to get the check total right. I wonder if they know how an unhappy customer’s ‘tip math’ works?

  • Nocturnal Journeys

    Well, our fears have returned. Just when we thought our youngest was cured of his late night voyages, we discovered him wandering outside at 1 am! The motion light and storm door closing was what woke me. I peered outside to see our seven-year-old barefoot on our front walk calling for his bigger brother. We called him in and he still wasn’t quite awake. He usually does this when he has to use the bathroom, so that’s where I sent him and, sure enough, he had to go. Looks like it’s time to start limiting those drinks of water right before bedtime!

  • Test Anxiety

    Nothing quite beats the prize for sadism like the 9 volt battery test. Certainly you recall this simple procedure. If you ever doubted that your (insert 9 volt battery-powered device here) wasn’t working you could always pull the battery out and use the good ol’ tongue gauge to test it.

    The ‘9 volt jolt’ ranked right below ‘peeling off band-aids’ on the pain index but the anticipation of whether or not you’d ‘get it’ was like Russian roulette. How many devices in your world would you risk personal discomfort to check to see that they’re in working order? (“Yep, that blade is sharp all right!”)

    The stupid part is, until they came out with the built-in battery testers on the packaging, I half dreaded opening any battery-powered device to find that it was 9 volt powered. It’s almost like you had to conduct the tongue test. If it was a AAA or AA battery there was a private sigh of relief. I mean c’mon! It’s not like you can toss one of those in your mouth to find out if they had any juice left in them.

  • Migration

    The Canadian Goose is one amazing bird. How they can instinctively know when it is time to make the trek back north defies logic sometimes. It’s always a sure sign that we’ve rounded the corner when you see those flocks enduring wind, sleet and snow to make it back home again. Their distant honks seem to announce ‘spring is finally here, whether it looks like it or not!’

  • Contentment

    In today’s ‘fast food’ world it’s hard not to get things our way. Often times we dispose of something perfectly suitable to upgrade to something better, not out of necessity, but preference. How spoiled are we? It’s times like these that I am thankful that we live with the blessings we do. I try very hard not to take for granted those things I have which I don’t deserve but strive to be content instead.

  • Luck

    Is there really such a thing as luck? I guess when you really, really long for something to happen your mind tends to be extra perceptive to those things that seem to go in your favor, but is it luck when it happens? Luck suggests something unbridled and uncontrollable. It’s not attributable to anything. It’s based on nothing more than changing circumstances. One person’s good luck is another’s bad misfortune. I guess it’s all relative. In the end I don’t consider myself lucky at all, but blessed.

  • Potholes

    The ice and snow really does a number on our streets. My brother is a bridge engineer with the state so he has a fair amount of experience with road design and maintenance. On a recent trip to Arizona, he couldn’t get over how immaculate the streets looked. Their condition made them appear that they were all freshly paved when in fact they were years old. The lack of extreme temperature and weather conditions makes road repair not only easier to do but less frequent.

    Meanwhile, there are several streets in our area that need some serious attention… and soon. When you have to drive on a main thoroughfare like you’re navigating a minefield it may be time to get the tar and gravel crews out. Some of those potholes are more like foxholes. The inconvenience of road crews tearing up our streets during the spring and summer isn’t exactly pleasant but considering how long our winters are we really can’t be that ungrateful.