Kids, five years apart

Posted on by
Reply

These two shots were take five years apart on top of the whaling boat at Whale World in Albany. I didn’t realise that the first image was such low resolution. Five years later, my phone has 10x the resolution.

Embedding Google Plus posts

Posted on by
Reply

Google+ introduced a couple of new features on Monday, including a new tool that allows bloggers and content creators to embed public Google+ posts on other sites.

Users who wish to highlight a Google+ post within a news story or on a personal blog can do so by clicking the “Embed post” tab from the drop down menu in the post’s upper righthand corner. Users can then copy and paste the available line of code to embed the post, including text and photos.

This is great, since I spend most of my time now on Google+ rather than on Facebook or tending my mostly neglected blog. Hey, it’s paying it’s way so it’s been a bit of a set/forget thing. But now I can post once on Google and then drag it over here.

I am become Dropsy, destroyer of technology

Posted on by
Reply

I don’t know what it is. I’ve dropped two expensive pieces of kit this year. First, my new Samsung Galaxy S3 phone about a month after I bought it. It’s got a crack in the screen in one corner. Luckily it is still usable and doesn’t bother me all that much day to day.

But this week I also dropped Jett’s ASUS TF202 Transformer tablet. I honestly don’t know how it happened. I was cleaning up in the family room, picking up this and that and somehow lost traction when I picked up the tablet. Gravity took care of the rest. I almost caught it, but it dropped right on the corner.

I felt like such and idiot. I’ve always impressed on the kids how expensive these are, and to treat them delicately. But here comes dad and practically throws it on the ground.

Jett insists, rightly I guess, on a replacement. The good thing is he wants a smaller Nexus 7 rather than a 10-inch tablet. And because the 2013 N7 just came out, the first gen are being dumped  on ebay for about 40% of the new price, even New In Box.

A mensroom encounter I could have done without

Posted on by
1

I needed to use the bathroom today at work, something which I usually try to avoid. I generally don’t use public facilities if I can avoid it. We share bathrooms with the other tenants in our building, but they usually aren’t too busy. There are four stalls and no urinal. This has advantages, but there are some serious disadvantages if certain simple principles are followed.

A situation come up today where I went to the bathroom and all but one stall had the door closed and locked so that the little spinny lock thing showed the word “Occupied” in red letters.

It was natural for me to assume that the fourth stall, the one with the door partially open, was unoccupied. After all, who uses a stall and leaves the door half open. You either usually close it or, if you’re feeling particularly confident and carefree. So I moved to open the door, only to find a man already in there, sitting down doing his business.

“What the fuck mate?”

“Sorry dude. Carry on”.

If he’d left it at that, things would have been ok.

“Fucking idiot. Couldn’t you see that I was in here?”

This line of questioning “rustled my jimmies”, so to speak, and I felt the need to belittle him and put him in his place, but instead what came out was quite restrained I thought.

“No. There’s no way I could have known you were in there, you douche. There’s no way I could have known anybody was in there. If the door was closed and locked it would be easy to assume someone was in there. If the door was fully open, it would have been easy to see you there. But you chose to leave the door only partially open, so you essentially invited me to open the door. Why would you do this?

He mumbled something under his breath and stomped out without flushing, and also without washing. I felt some pity mixed in with my revulsion. The “douche” name-calling is something I was not exactly proud of.