Garrett M. Vonk

Wow. I just got an email from iRobot pitching their Pool Robot, Verro, and I was suddenly reminded of my childhood fear of automatic pool cleaning devices. You want to talk irrational and consuming fears? If I was in a pool and one of these suction cleaner things was on, you could find me on the opposite end of said pool, eying it suspiciously. It had nothing to do with any real fear of drowning or being hurt; I had the full gamut of swim lessons and was completely comfortable in the water. There was just something about these roving plastic machines that scared the shit out of me.

Can anybody ’splain me why there is a “MARTA Tax” on my cable bill? What does Comcast have to do with MARTA?

I just saw this quote in an article about the Virginia Tech shootings. Does this send chills down anyone else’s spine?

Some news accounts have suggested that Cho had a history of antidepressant use, but senior federal officials tell ABC News that they can find no record of such medication in the government’s files. This does not completely rule out prescription drug use, including samples from a physician, drugs obtained through illegal Internet sources, or a gap in the federal database, but the sources say theirs is a reasonably complete search.

It doesn’t really surprise me that they have a huge, privacy-invading database of our prescriptions, but what is unnerving to me is how definitive they consider it. I can just picture a Shadowy Government Official at his computer… “Why, he must not have been on antidepressants,” *clickety-clackety* “I don’t see it anywhere in our records.”

Edit: Someone at Boing Boing noticed the quote too and has a little more information on this database.

• Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. - My new favorite grammatically correct sentence.
• The Buttered Cat Paradox
  

  They propose that as the cat falls towards the ground, it will slow down and start to rotate, eventually reaching a steady state of hovering a short distance from the ground while rotating at high speed as both the buttered side of the toast and the cat’s feet attempt to land on the ground.

• Gimli Glider - Beware the metric system! Due to a miscalculation, two Canadian pilots find themselves in control of a 300,000lb plane with 61 passengers and no fuel at an altitude of 40,000 feet.
  

  The pilots immediately opened the emergency guide looking for the section on flying the aircraft with both engines out, only to find that no such section existed.

  That sounds like it could be a useful section to have in the emergency guide. I’d imagine it would begin “Step One: Change into clean underwear.”

• Henry Box Brown - In 1849, a slave in Virginia shipped himself to freedom in Pennsylvania in a wooden crate. I guess a follow-up one-liner is out of the question… What can Brown do for you? Anyone?
• Always be sure not to let the Magic Smoke out of your devices…

Master of Business Administration

I flew down to Palm Beach for a day to see my Dad walk across the stage and get his MBA from FAU. Now, he can teach business school if he wants to (and I think he wants to), imparting the many lessons he’s learned over his career on a new batch of would-be entrepeneurs and businesspeople. Congratulations, Dad! I was happy to get to spend some time with the family yesterday and go shoot pool with Stephen, Ashley, and Christine. Also, Happy Birthday to my sister, Christine, who turned 24 yesterday.

My Head Explodes

This is probably the most frustrating customer service phone call I’ve ever heard in my life.

This is a whole new level of frustration that not even Vincent Ferrari ever encountered. At least in the case of slimy retention specialists, you’re both on the same page. If I were dealing with people making so egregious a mistake, it would probably be all I could do not to stab myself in the eye with a salad fork. This isn’t “cancel the account” 47 times while the guy pretends not to hear you. This is thirty straight minutes of CSRs at increasing levels of management failing to recall their fourth grade math lessons. To me, it’s almost unbearable to listen to. The best part, the shining pinnacle of ignorance, is near the end of the call when the “floor manager” tells George that their math error–overcharging him by one hundred times the amount they’re quoting–is just a “difference of opinion”.

In All Seriousness

I’m sitting here at PBI waiting for my plane to Hilton Head to board. The guy next to me just reached over to plug in his laptop and noticed my laptop’s power cable plugged into the outlet by his seat. He whipped out his travel surge protector and turned to me and asked, in a very serious voice, “Sir! Would you like to plug your laptop into my surge-protected outlet?” For some reason, this struck me as riotously funny at 7:15 in the morning. I stifled a chuckle and said “No thanks, I’m fine.” It guess was funny in both a wow-you’re-really-excited-about-your-surge-protector way and an um-is-that-supposed-to-be-a-euphemism way.

Seriously, does anyone want to eat pizza out of a baked cone? Wouldn’t I just look like an idiot eating, like, ham and eggs or chicken quesadilla out of what is basically an ice cream cone?

With its easy-to-handle shape, the Crispy Cone is the food you’ll love to eat on the move. Whether in the car, the mall, or walking down the street, the Crispy Cone lets you enjoy its delicious, hassle-free flavors while shuffling through your MP3, driving your car, working at your desk or talking on your cell phone.

I want to see the infomercial for this… Desaturated video of an old dude walking down the street eating ham and eggs from expensive china, and he trips and spills it all over his shirt, breaking the china plate as well. ” There’s got to be a better way!” he screams.

Voiceover: Introducing the Crispy Cone! All the fun of an ice cream cone, with all the tasty goodness of Chicken Teriyaki.

Here’s my advice for the day. Try to stop living in anticipation of the next thing: the next phase, the promotion, retirement, kids, car, album, or whatever. For too long in my life, I’ve been desparately waiting for whatever came next. Thoughts like this come to mind: (these are not necessarily actually my concerns, just examples)

Whenever I get my own apartment…
I can’t wait until I make XYZ dollars…
When will I be able to stop worrying about A, B, or C.
Sure, I hate my job now, but someday I’ll have a better one.
Even things like I can’t wait until there’s something decent to watch on TV again.

But I need to remember that, as I’ve remarked before, life is quite finite. This is it. Your life doesn’t begin once you graduate college, or graduate high school, or retire, or have a kid, or make more money, or any of these things. Your life is happening now. This is your only chance to take advantage of it. Stop waiting for whatever it is that you think will make your life better, and enjoy the life that you have.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that you can’t have goals. Achievement and self-improvement are some of the best ways to improve your life, as it happens. But you simply cannot exist in a state of nervous anticipation, holding off on your happiness until you reach whatever mountaintop you seek. That’s holding yourself hostage 80% of the time for some mythical 20% that may–or may not–live up to your expectations.

In the end, it’s like seeing your favorite band in concert. You absolutely cannot just tune out whatever’s going on in anticipation of the next song, because if you do you’ll spend the whole night that way instead of just enjoying it. And for all of us, the music is eventually going to fade.

Just a quick post to recap our trip to Destin for Memorial Day Weekend.

This has been the third year in a row we’ve been, and it’s gotten crazier and crazier down there. The beach was completely packed with people drinking and partying (far more than we were on both accounts). It truly is “white-collar spring break”.

I ran into several people I know, including my old boss from my last job, and some guy I swam by about 20ft into the Gulf of Mexico who said “Hey, don’t you work for [my company]?” Yeah, in the ocean. It’s a small world.

Is it just me, or are we past the point where you’re allowed to complain about the complexity of the process at Starbucks? Not only are the sentiments “OMG Starbucks is teh confusing” and “Small = Tall? What a country!” incredibly overused and flat out not funny, but people usually talk about their confusion as if they’re the first coffee novice to ever experience this problem.

There is no tolerance for novices who do have enough respect for the fancy-coffee place to study and learn the culture. I could feel the cold stares of the experienced customers who were full of heavy-syllable words spelling caffeine relief ending in “o” and I was requiring them to dam up this river of syllables until I could babble, in layman’s garble, a pitiful attempt to order something that may not even end in “o.”

I could feel the hostile text-messaging going on around me.

I didn’t want to be here now. I now wanted to be somewhere else, maybe drinking a cup of coffee in the English language.

It’s not like Detective Rose strolled into the Starbucks at 7th and Broadway in Manhattan. He’s probably talking about the location on Roswell Rd. near Hammond, around the corner from a big-ass Kroger, and across the street from a McDonald’s. I’ve been there many times. You generally encounter soccer moms and landscapers here just as often as you see graphic designers and music critics. The big difference, apparently, is that said soccer moms actually figured out what kind of coffee they sell years ago.

“What size would you like that in sir?” said the coffee technician.

“Small.”

“Tall?”

“No, small.”

“Small is tall sir.”

“Tall sounds big. Small sounds like what I want. Is tall the same size as small?”

“All I know is tall is small so small must be tall.”

I’m in a Dr. Seuss cartoon.

[from this week's View From The Cop, an AJC blog written by a Sandy Springs police officer]

Yes, sir, you’re in a Dr. Seuss cartoon. Welcome to 1996, when everyone else made the same observation and then got over it.

Here’s some funny links that have been rolling around in my browser this week…

I often try to brainstorm good, consistent topics for blogging that would provide for a lot of easy material. This is not to say that I “need more readers” or anything silly like that. It’s more of a thought exercise, much like the “come up with wildly complicated inventions or building plans in my head” game that my dad taught me as a kid (and which I still use) to help me fall asleep. The reason I bring this up is that I came across such a “low hanging fruit” type of subject matter that is absolutely ripe for witty discussion: the comics. I just added The Comics Curmudgeon to my feeds because it’s one of those concepts that I wish I had thought up. Daily (snarky) commentary on the funnies… It’s like TVWOP for comic strips.

And from another very funny site I just found, here’s a great list detailing How To Tell You’re A Superhero.

Your nickname in high school was “That weird kid who jumped nine stories to put out an apartment fire with his ice breath.”

OK, one more, because it made me laugh out loud at work.

Most of your romantic relationships end in plummets.

OK, one more link, and it’s back to work for me.
The Perry Bible Fellowship -This well-drawn strip is riotously funny, at least to me. I thus wasted at least an hour reading the entire archive, one by one.