It's Dai Time

Katie & Scott & Simon & Cecily.

Author: Scott (Page 84 of 104)

Day 66: if i had a hammer

April 18, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Today, I put two doorknobs onto doors in our house. One doorknob had been broken on one side (the knob just spun) and the other door was missing a knob entirely. It made me feel pretty handy – the kind of feeling you get after putting together your IKEA furniture multiplied by ten. It also means we have two more functioning doors than we did this morning.

We purchased our new doorknobs from our local TrueValue Hardware store, which is endearing because it’s family-run and a delightful young Asian boy called Katie “ma’am” and asked if he could help us. And help us he did! He knew exactly where the doorknobs were. He also told us that his grandma could help us pick something else if we didn’t find what we needed. It was like eating at a Chinese restaurant, where we knew the owners. Except, instead of food, we got served doorknobs!

Growing up, Katie owned more tools than I did. Her dad built their house, so it kind of makes sense. The only tools I brought to our relationship were a set of tiny screwdrivers that are only useful for computer and eyeglass repair. If I had to build a house, it would have been made out of computer cases and eyeglass frames.

The only tool that we don’t have right now (besides a mysterious missing hammer) is a wrench, which doesn’t seem to phase Katie much. Well, that’s not the only tool we don’t have – just the only “basic” tool, I suppose. We do have a stud finder, which when activated, just points to me. Booyeah!

Get it? Because I’m a stud! Like, a fat piece of wood!

I do wish I had done more carpentry or handy-work when I was younger. I feel ill-prepared for that portion of responsibilities as a homeowner, although my doorknob experience this morning has helped build my confidence a bit. I’m sure that building sets during college also helped.

I need to stop writing these things late at night and while watching TV. It’s very hard to pay attention when people are getting their heads lopped off on Harper’s Island.

“The last thing I need is a deer head in my bathtub!”
With dialogue like that, who needs a wrench?

Day 65: numbers

April 17, 2009 / / 0 Comments

I was talking my friend Dan through the Internet today about a variety of topics and I expressed that I had, just this season, found myself becoming a bit of a fan of the Oakland A’s – our local baseball team.

I attributed this sudden liking to several factors: we recently bought a house less than 5 miles away from the stadium, star outfielder Matt Holliday is on both my fantasy teams, and the team has two young promising pitching prospects.  And there’s nothing that gets me excited like prospects, be they young baseball players, untapped rivers where gold nuggets are to be found, or a variety of eligible bachelors.

He then mentioned that he liked their GM, Billy Beane, because he consistently managed the team well, while having to deal with the budget of a small-market team.  He also mentioned that Beane pioneered the use of the statistical analysis that most baseball teams now use (in some format) for evaluating players.

Which got me thinking: I like numbers.  Deep in my heart, behind the emotions and aorta, I often think that most things can be determined by numbers.

And I find numbers comforting.  If my fantasy baseball players are performing poorly right now, but their past numbers indicate that this is well outside the realm of how they’ll finish the year, all I have to do is wait.  The numbers say that they’ll get better, and the numbers know a lot more than I do.

I can look back on the amount of money our household has spent on the past 6 months on dining out at restaurants versus groceries and they will inform me of trends and patterns that are helpful for future planning of both finances and food.

Numbers calm me down when I think about things like plane crashes or random murders or meteors crashing into my house.

I also really like math.  I love being able to distill decisions down to a simple (or not so simple) equation.  That’s probably also why I like games so much.  Video games tend to have some of these decisions (RPGs and games with inventory management have more), but Euro-style board games are essentially an hour-long exercise in making decisions based on math.

I think I’d like managing a professional sports team, although I don’t know if I could deal with all the hate mail.  Or all the athletes.

Day 64: purchases that i have regretted, in ascending order of regretfulness

April 16, 2009 / / 0 Comments
  • pPETS-3757601dtTidy Cats cat litter
    I bought this brand, instead of our normal Fresh Step brand, because it was on sale.

    Although their motto is “Keep Home Smelling Like Home,” it was best at making our home smell like cat poop a lot faster than Fresh Step.  I suppose if your home smells like cat poop to you, that’s a fair slogan.

 


  • 05200901 Cold Heat Soldering Iron
    I don’t know what I was thinking.  I don’t solder things.  I’ve never used this.

    It might work very well.  I wouldn’t know.


 

  • 932682_75052 The Ship
    I bought this years after the game came out because it was cheap at Target and I thought the premise was interesting.

    A tip for any potential buyers: The Ship is primarily a multiplayer game.  The single player experience is essentially a tutorial that teaches you the controls and rules.  I think there was, oh, about 1 server still running by the time I started playing this.  It’s hard to engage in a multiplayer experience where there are only 3 other people in the world who still play the game.

  • Conair_Deluxe_Hydro_Bath_Spa6VX-detail Conair Deluxe Hydro Bath Spa
    To be fair, this thing works OK.  It’s not horrible in terms of functionality.  It’s just so…embarrassing.

    From it’s phallic shape, to the fact that you’re submerging part of an electrical device in water, to the pitiful attempt to make your bathtub feel like a spa (nay, a Deluxe Spa!), it’s just not a very marketable product.  And yet, I bought one.

  • 41ftpW12yHL._SL500_AA280_ Intec DSL Ultimate Game Case for Nintendo DS
    What a piece of crap.  I can’t believe I fell for the “Ultimate” tagline.

    In the uselessness arena, it scores big points for holding an extra battery and a battery compartment screwdriver (both not included).  It’s also huge and is made from hard plastic, such that getting games in and out of the case was hard work.  I still regret having spent $5 on this, when I could have eaten 25 candy bars instead.

  • l_pasta_express5 Pasta Express
    The purpose of the pasta express is to make cooking pasta easier and faster.  Unfortunately, it does neither.

    You still have to boil water, but instead of just putting pasta into a saucepan, you have to pour it into this thin tube.  Since it is no longer on the burners, the water gets cooler faster and your pasta is undercooked.

    Then, when you go to strain the water, be careful not to hold the tube itself (you have to use the blue slippery glove!), lest you get burned.  You’ll probably still get burned anyway, as the flimsy top falls off from the force of the water, spilling water and pasta everywhere.

    Enjoy (cleaning up and eating undercooked pasta)!  I did use the pasta express once to soak tea eggs for a day, for which it did a decent job.  I think we’ve since given this monstrosity to a charity or homeless shelter or something.  God help them.

Day 63: all a-twitter

April 15, 2009 / / 0 Comments

As I mentioned, yesterday, I gave an over-the-phone eyewitness interview for the local ABC news channel.  How did that happen?

It’s because I was on twitter and tweeted about the accident on the San Mateo Bridge as we were going across, and was one of the first people (on Twitter, at least) to note that a boat seemed to be hitting the side of the bridge.

Someone on the local news team who was monitoring Twitter replied to me and opened up a dialogue about the boat.  I called their news desk and they quickly patched me onto the air to do a quick little bit about what I had seen.

Sure, I wasn’t the most reliable witness (I had seen it quickly out the car window as we passed by on the opposite side of the bridge), but with the high winds yesterday, news teams were not able to get helicopters into the air to get video footage.

Regardless, what a brave new world we live in, where everyone with a phone is an amateur journalist.  Yesterday was the perfect example of Twitter being a great resource for immediate information.  I was able to search Twitter for “San Mateo Bridge” on my phone and get instant up-to-the-minute updates on what real people were seeing and experiencing in terms of traffic and the accident.

Since Twitter has kind of exploded in popularity over the past year or so, I’ve heard Twitter backlash from various places – friends and comments on blogs and message boards, mainly – that argues that the service is silly and useless.

While I think that Twitter can be used in a silly and useless way (much like most new social networks and ways to communicate, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and text messaging), I think it’s actually a more powerful messaging service than most people realize.

Because it’s so simple (all messages are short and public and easily searchable), it provides an infrastructure for a wide variety of uses.  And the biggest plus?  It’s all opt-in and anything that I want to ignore is only, at most 140 characters long.

I think, in the end, Twitter’s greatest asset is that it is immediate and can be, at least more than other social networks, quite personal.

And being able to claim that you know Greg Grunberg’s innermost thoughts.  Or at least that he helped create an iPhone app called Yowza!  (The exclamation point is part of the name of the app, not genuine excitement on my part.)

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