Back on December 29th, I posted about a rather crazy set of rebate requirements, and noted that I’d just met all of the requirements for sending in the rebate forms.
Today, five months and a day later, I received the rebate checks. Amazing. For the record, I’d like to note that this was 364 days after the purchase of the phones.
Odd book. Appropriately subtitled “A Nightmare,” you don’t know who’s on your side, and before the end of the book you have hoards of people chasing the heroes, foes showing themselves to be friends, and allies being absorbed into the oncoming mob. This story, written in the early 20th century, also gives you a duel, a car chase — perhaps one of the first ever recorded — and (I kid you not) a high speed elephant chase through the streets of London, with the heroes pursuing in cabs (the horse-drawn kind).
If you want a book that has the tables turning again and again (sorry — once you’ve read the second chapter, you can yell at me for that), read this one about a police detective posing as a poet who accidentally infiltrates a Supreme Anarchy Council in his attempt to eliminate anarchy, only to find out that the Supreme Anarchist is someone very different than ever he would have imagined.
Have you read it? What did you think?
It had been a few weeks since I’d placed an order for an expansion part for one of my printers, and since I had a few free minutes this afternoon before leaving for a church service, I decided to shoot off an E-Mail to my sales rep to see if everything was okay.
So I wrote the message, and as I was signing it, a truck pulled up. From Xerox. With the part.
Odds? Enough to make quite a lot of money if you were betting on that sort of thing. It was approximately a 30-second window, 15 days from the starting block.
I decided that it might be a novel idea to actually finish a book that I’ve started reading (having run out of bookmarks and miscellaneous other flat things serving to keep my place in various books, and also having run out of space on my bedside table). Since Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss was a borrowed book, and since I was almost done anyway, that’s the first one on my list.
Fun book. A definite must-read for people who get aggravated when they see two spaces between mid-sentence words instead of just one. Or even people who aren’t quite that lost to all reason. It has prompted some changes in how I proofread missionary letters.
From the introduction:
Either this will ring bells for you, or it won’t. A printed banner has appeared on the concourse of a petrol station [I should mention that this is a British author] near to where I live. “Come inside,” it says, “for CD’s, VIDEO’s, DVD’s, and BOOK’s.”
If this […] causes no little gasp of horror or quickening of the pulse, you should probably put down this book at once. […] For any true stickler, you see, the sight of the plural word “Book’s” with an apostrophe in it will trigger a ghastly private emotional process similar to the stages of bereavement, though greatly accelerated. First there is shock. Within seconds, shock gives way to disbelief, disbelief to pain, and pain to anger. Finally (and this is where the analogy breaks down), anger gives way to a righteous urge to perpetrate an act of criminal damage with the aid of a permanent marker.
The hardcover version is roughly 200 pages, in large print, small pages, with large margins, and it’s an easy read, so it won’t take much time. I read it over a series of (solo) meals, parts of a plane ride, and on a bus. It could probably be read in an evening or two, depending on how many times you break out in laughter and have to try to explain to your spouse why a comma can be so funny.
“You give me any word, and I tell you how it comes from Greek.”
There are a number of words (such as “kimono”) that you wouldn’t expect to come from Greek (sometimes quite reasonably because they don’t). Take “hyphen” for example. Not at first glance a word that’s quite as easily recognized as, say, “recognized”.
hyphen -> `uphen -> `uph-en -> `upo `en
Just a normal, transliterated Greek word.
This page has gotten enough outside traffic that I decided to take it down. I haven’t researched what I wrote here, and don’t want to be considered an authority on the matter, since I’m not.
Please check with your pastor or other wise Christians for an answer to the question of what 30 pieces of silver would be worth in today’s terms — is it a pittance, or a lordly sum? Either way, our reaction can give us a good deal of insight into our own motivations and faith.
My office is officially much hotter than I’d like it to be, again. Spring’s here. I’m not putting in A/C this year, though. Why not? Because I’m moving tomorrow!
I’ve run out of work and storage space in my little office (not to mention power circuits), so with the addition of a new inserter, it’s time to move. I’ve signed a one-year lease on a nice-looking professional building in Wilder, which will give me about triple the space I have now, and make it considerably easier for more than one person to do work at a time without tripping over each other (Christine and I have yet to do that, but each of us is definitely disruptive to the other’s workflow).
Trying to accomplish the move without any noticeable downtime is probably nuts, but we’ll see how it goes. My work queue is currently cleaned out, which is a good start.
