And why worry about a speck in your friend’s eye when you have a log in your own? Or more commonly known as,”Do as I say, not as I do.” We’ve all heard this proverbial adage before and undoubtedly every one of us is guilty of living it from time to time. Nobody likes a hypocrite. Remember that when you point the finger at someone else, you have three fingers pointing back at you.
Everybody has their vices. Chocolate. Donuts. Coffee. I guess mine would have to be my wife’s chocolate chip cookies. They’re habit forming. If you’re fortunate enough to be in my neighborhood at work, you’ll get to try them yourself. The last thing I need is over three batches of cookies at home. Yes, nothing beats a chocolate chip cookie on a cold, snowy, spring day.
Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.
It’s difficult to remain completely objective with regard to those that don’t share the same values, ideals or opinions as yourself. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Thinking oneself better than another for any reason is a matter of selfish pride. Every one of us is guilty of prejudices against others and every one of us falls short of perfect – by a lot. Having the courage to acknowledge and admit this fact takes humility and integrity. Just think how different the world would be if we not only remained mindful of this advice but held our tongues long enough to evaluate ourselves by the same standard we use to judge others.
I don’t think anyone can deny that this country is all about eating on the go. The fast food empire remains strong and many franchises are extending their reach. Some have ventured into the late night binge market and others are joining in to reinvent the most important meal of the day – breakfast.
Fast food steadies like McD’s, Hardees and Burger King have done breakfast forever it seems, but now we see more chains jumping on the morning meal wagon. I thought it was absurd when Taco John’s entered the race but lately even ‘the healthy choice’ Subway has made the leap. Where will it end? As America’s obesity epidemic continues these franchises look to compete for your dollar 24 hours a day.
As a designer and instructor I’m always preaching the importance of good typography to clients and students. Choosing a typeface that communicates clearly and reinforces the literal, as well as implied meaning of an item is a skill that every successful designer must master. Granted, even the best designers will fail on occasion when it comes to choosing the right typeface, but most agree about which ones to avoid all together. One such typeface for me is Comic Sans.
About the only time I would endorse the use of this typeface as a valid design choice is when setting the dialog in a comic book word bubble (even then, it’s a weak choice – there are far better). Every typeface has a personality and evokes a certain set of emotions. To me Comic Sans is synonymous with silliness, lightheartedness, and comedy. So, you can about imagine what my reaction was when I saw it used to set the word “Ambulance” on a small town emergency vehicle that raced by.
That was easily one of the most awkward moments I think I’ve ever been in. In one breath I thought of the poor patient inside whose life may have been in serious peril and then laughed at the irony and utter ridiculousness of Comic Sans being used in such a situation. Before you write off all designers as being callous critics, please note that it was my wife who first noticed the visual incongruity (I’ll probably need an ambulance for admitting that).
In my book, there’s no more potent elixir than NyQuil. Like a stiff shot of saloon whiskey, it goes down hard but does what it says it will do – knock you out. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the handy plastic dosage cup is about the same size as a shot glass either. And as far as flavor goes I equate this horrible-tasting stuff to Jägermeister. You could drop of shot of this into some Red Bull and make a NyQuilar Bomb. One shot and the party would be over.
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!
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?
It’s funny how your image of authority figures tends to change as you get older. As a kid in athletics there was sort of a negative stigma attached to the hard-line, uber-competitive coach. You know, the violently gum-chewing, whistle-blowing, arrogant, perpetually angry-because-his-team-didn’t-make-it-to-State-when-he-was-in-high-school-so-you’re-gonna-pay-penance-for-it coach. The guy who ran you ’til you either passed out or died and who would scream rhetorical bits of sarcasm in your face until he was hoarse. So hoarse that he had to use his whistle to bark commands for the remainder of practice (don’t ask how, it’s obviously a gift). He was the ex-jock drill sergeant that felt his sport was more important than life itself – especially yours.
I’ve volunteered to coach a number of seasons with my sons’ baseball or soccer teams and I can honestly say I am not ‘that guy’. And even if I would happen to slip into that role for even a second it would only be because I want the kids to learn the rules of the game, have fun and win. Is that so wrong?!
This soon-to-be 80 year-old actor/director/producer has had quite the career. Lately he’s had such a string of directorial successes some people probably didn’t know he was ever an actor. I’ll never forget the first Clint Eastwood movie I watched. It was probably one he’d just as soon the world forgot, but in ‘Every Which Way But Loose’ the orangutan-owning, biker-loathing, prize-fighting trucker Philo Beddoe epitomized the Eastwood toughness factor in nothing more than jeans and a t-shirt. All things considered, the gravely-voiced machismo of his character was what typified a lot of his later roles and seeing it almost every other day on HBO made it a cult hit with us boys growing up. It wasn’t exactly the most impressionable program for an eight-year-old to be watching, but let’s be honest, Clint Eastwood could beat the crap out of Sesame Street.