Arctangential

I was in Half-Price Books the other day (which, by the way, is a wonderful store and if you live near one, you should visit it at your nearest opportunity) and while I was browsing $1 CDs, a middle-aged couple walked in. They were looking for an audiobook; I know this because the husband asked the sales clerk (loudly) where the audiobooks were kept.

After being directed to the section, clearly labeled “Audiobooks” near the front of the store, the couple begins to discuss that the book they’re looking for is “that Harry Potter book, by J. K. Rowling”.

“Now would that be under ‘Harry’, ‘J’ or ‘Rowling’?” asked the wife, clearly unable to modulate her voice for indoor speaking.

“I just don’t know,” said the husband, equally unable to speak quietly, and went over to ask the clerk again, who explained that audiobooks were sorted alphabetically by author, and then had to further explain that the book in question would be under “Rowling”.

Returning to his wife, the man passed on the information, which I suppose had been heard by every person in the store SAVE his wife, and then then proceeded to search for the audiobook. After 5 minutes or so, having not found it, they begin to discuss if such an audiobook would even exist. “Maybe they never made one,” ventured the husband, and went to ask this also of the clerk.

I lost track of the couple after this point, but as I was leaving the store (with about $80 worth of books, CDs and DVDs (a light day)), the wife was having an animated discussion with the clerk, trying to figure out if they possibly had a secondary cache of audiobooks elsewhere in the store where this elusive “Harry Potter” might be found.

I don’t understand why people can’t speak indoors in a reasonable tone of voice. Nor do I understand why people can’t understand that a used book store does not always have every product in the world available. But what I REALLY don’t understand is how two people can make it into their 50s without understanding how media products are arranged on shelves.

What also upsets me is that these people are allowed to drive and also to vote.

I stopped yesterday evening at a local diner for a hot turkey sandwich. I really shouldn’t eat them, but sometimes I just need one, and I’ve joined a honest to goodness gym, so I feel less guilty about the occasional extravagance.

Anyways, that’s not what my story is about. My story is about the crazy lady in the booth next to me at this diner. She wasn’t hurling obscenities or spitting uncontrollably; she was actually sitting quietly and drinking a cup of tea while she read the menu. At first, I thought nothing of her, apart that maybe she wasn’t really the type I’m used to seeing in this diner in the wee hours. She was a small woman, in her mid-forties, dressed conservatively (or at least unmemorably); I’m used to seeing construction workers, drunk and/or stoned teenagers, and a variety of scruffy miscreants (such as myself) in this place, at this time, but even so, she didn’t particularly stand out.

As I was seated, the waitress (there’s only one working at this time of night) took my drink order and then stopped by the woman’s table to ask if she’d decided. She said no, and asked some kind of question about the menu; I don’t remember exactly what it was, something about if a particular dish came with fries or if it was possible to get just fries. A stupid question. A few minutes later, the waitress returned with my drink, took my order and then went to ask the woman if she’s made any more progress deciding what she wanted. The woman asked some other asinine question about the menu and then said she needed more time to think about it.

This pattern repeated itself the whole time I was there. I got my soup (I ended up with gumbo despite having asked for wedding soup, but the gumbo was actually pretty good, so I didn’t say anything), and the woman asked something like, “what is country-fried steak” and then for more time to consider her options. I got my hot turkey sandwich (they sprinkle crispy onions on top of it, it’s so good.), and she did it again. Each time the waitress came to bring or ask me something, she would ask this woman again if she wanted to order, and she was never able to decide. Just as I was getting done with my dinner, the woman suddenly put down her menu and, having drunk only half of her mug of hot tea in this entire time, got up to pay her bill. After paying, she returned to her table to leave a tip: one cent. She put it down kind of angrily and then stalked out the front door. Maybe she was upset that the menu was too complicated.

She should have ordered a hot turkey sandwich. They’re really good.

I am unbelievably stupid.

Some background; my computer has a weird intermittent hardware problem where, upon boot, something happens to the network card. I’m not sure exactly what goes wrong, but when it does, the computer knows it HAS a network card, but is unable to do things like acquire an IP address from DHCP. The problem seems unfixable once it’s occurred; the only solution is a reboot. However, this isn’t a big deal, since it usually only takes 3 or 4 reboots to get working again, and I can identify the problem early in the boot phase.

So, tonight I opened up my PC to put in a new video card (which then came back out; another story entirely), set everything back up, turned on my PC, and there was the error. Not even thinking, I just hit reset, because that’s what I do when I see that error. The next boot, error again. I rebooted about 10 times and the error kept happening. At this point I got worried, so I powered the machine off and decided to let it rest a little bit. I spent the next 5 hours messing with the computer, on and off.

I tried everything I could think of: I opened it up and reseated the cards, I did software reboots, hardware resets and hard power downs. I let it wait a little while, I let it wait a long time. I left it on for an hour and then did a reset. I reconfigured the network card, I read through the logs for hints. Nothing worked. Then I looked over, and saw it. The network cord. Was not. Plugged. In.

At least I’m back online now.

You know what I’ve realized; since moving to the West Coast, I don’t have anybody to talk to late at night any more. I used to be able to chat with my west coast friends since they were 3 hours behind of me, but now they’re all in the same time zone and go to sleep way too early. And of course the east coasters… only if I stay up VERY late do I get to talk to them.

I need to find some interesting Australians to chat with or something. anybody know any interesting Australians?

I had an interesting media acquisition day today. I picked up:

Dave Brubeck's Greatest Hits,
The 40 Year Old Virgin (HD-DVD),
The Man Who Fell to Earth (Criterion Collection Edition),
symbiopsychotaxiplasm (Criterion Collection also),
Sunrise,
and How Green was My Valley

The Man Who Fell to Earth also came with a book, and I also got a Rubik’s cube. In tangentially-media-related news, I also got a DVD holder at Ikea, and a 24″ widescreen monitor.

I’m done buying stuff for… well, a while anyways. Hopefully.

Happy summer everybody!

I have had these pictures around for weeks, I actually tooke them before we went to SF, but for some reason I forgot to post them until now. I’m hosting them on Flickr, so click each thumbnail for the full-sized picture.

The first two are of the personalized incriptions on my most recent Achewood book purchases:

And the covers of those two books:

This is the stupid Superman Returns USB hub I bought; it was the cheapest one they had, and it works just fine. I keep it hidden, though, apart from this photo. I think it came out pretty well; I like the lighting here.

And finally, this is my hand. The light came out terrible, I think — it makes my hand look all wrinkly. I tried a few times, but it turns out it is really hard to take a picture of your own hand, especially your own right hand (if you’re right-handed, that is). Anyhow, the point of this picture is to show off my trick: touching my pointer and pinky fingers together with no external assistance. It’s pretty hard and I have to strain at it, but I haven’t met anybody else yet who can do it. Can any of you?

I didn’t sleep again last night. It happens to me less these days, and it tends to take more and more extenuating circumstances to occur, but it does still happen. At least I’m still able to more or less function as normal after a nuit blanche, but I’m not sure if that’s a testament to my lack of need for sleep, or my generally low level of energy and competence in normal circumstances.

Anyways, here’s what happened: Yesterday afternoon I went to a kind of little party on a boat. It was one of those small yacht kind of deals, I think about 40″ long, with a motor and a toilet and a fridge, so kind of like a small and cramped floating living room. It was fun tooling around on the sound, and the company was good, but I got a little bit seasick and so wasn’t able to enjoy any of the food on the trip. As a result of this, on the way home (around 10pm), I stopped at a Jack in the Box and got a burger meal thing. Through some miscommunication, I ended up with a very large cup of diet coke with my order, and through stupidity, I drank it all, around 10:30pm.

I didn’t even start feeling tired until about 4:30am. When I did finally lay down, my bed began to gently rock as soon as I closed my eyes, and I started feeling a little bit queasy again. This might have been attributed to lingering seasickness, or it might have had more to do with the 99 cent “Monster Taco” that I added to my Jack in the Box order. In any case, I gave up around 5am and got back up. I left my house around 7:45 to head to work.

I saw a lot of things this morning that I don’t usually see during my regular commute, around 9 or 10am. I stopped into the local Denny’s for some country-fried steak (a manly and super-American breakfast), only to be seated at a table next to a group of 15 Buddhist monks, ranging in age from about 60 to 10 or so. They seemed very excited to be eating at Denny’s, taking lots of group pictures and discussing the menu quite animatedly in, I guess, Buddhish. I didn’t notice what all they ordered, as I didn’t want to stare (at least not any more than I already was).

I saw aggressive asshole drives on the roads, in much larger concentration than usual. After I left the Denny’s, I rounded the corner on a road I don’t take very often, only to find the lane I was in was closed for construction about 5 feet in front of me. There was a gap to my left, so I turned on my blinker and started to move over, but a fire engine yellow Nissan Xterra felt the need to zoom up and close the gap before I was able to get all the way in. I almost hit the traffic cones delimiting the construction zone. This is the kind of thing I expected driving in Boston (there, I wouldn’t have used my blinker), but it’s usually pretty rare in the Seattle area. I think I’ll be avoiding the rush hour commute from now on.

I just realized that I bought the wrong version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Never eat poi. It tastes like corruption.