I’m taking my 18-year old neighbour Hector to his driving license exam this afternoon. He’ll be using my Honda CR-V for the test, which is the standard battery of driving exercises performed while the examiner takes notes in the passenger seat. Hector’s a pretty decent driver and if he simply remembers to fight that younger man’s urge to lean heavily on the accelerator, he should do just fine.
Good luck, Hector!
Every now and again, I get calls on my cell phone from someone trying to reach Downtown Legal Services. It turns out that their phone number is differs from mine by one digit, and that digit is easy to misdial.
Lately, it’s been getting worse and I’ve just discovered why: a typo on a web page says that you can book appointments by calling my cell number. Most of the calls are just annoying, a couple are interesting, and one I got barely five minutes ago was hilarious:
Caller: Hey man, I gotta big problem and I was told to call you guys.
Me: Problem? Is this about software development?
Caller: No man, this is about charges against me.
Me: Hang on, this isn’t —
Caller: You see, I just got charged with theft under $1000 and dangerous operation…
Me: Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Stop right there. Don’t say anything more. This isn’t legal services.
Caller: It’s not?
Me: This is a private cell phone number.
Caller: And…you’re not a lawyer?
Me: No, so you shouldn’t be telling me about…um, whatever it is you did. There’s a typo on the Web site. Call Directory Assistance for the right number.
Caller: Oh shit.
Me: It’s okay. I don’t know your name, and I’ll wipe your number off my call display. And hey, it was under a thousand dollars.
Caller: Thanks, man! You rock!
It turns out that the protein bars already have bilingual labels and are not getting stopped at the border. The Atkins Peanut Butter and Choclate Hoarder I mentioned in the previous post had just bought out my store’s supply, but Karen the manager told me that more was on the way. The Hoarder and his wife, it turns out, have a fondness for Resse’s Preanut Butter Cups, and the Atkins bars are a very-close-in-taste, lower-carb, no sugar, no-trans-fats substitute. I guess I should pull the pins out of the voodoo doll.
FARK listed these two Atkins-related stories, one after the other for humourous effect:
Sometimes you never know what to believe.
As far as I’m concerned, it works — at least it did for me. Keep in mind that your mileage may vary and this is a small sample size, but other blog writers out there have lost at least 25 pounds in their first three months on the Atkins meal plan/diet/lifestyle eating methodology: Cory Doctorow, Doc Searls and Oliver Willis are a few whom I can name off the top of my head.
It would seem that only some Atkins products lack bilingual labels. See this entry.
Here in Canada, there’s a law that says that the packaging on products must be in both official languages, English and French. That’s why Marlboro cigarettes aren’t available except through bootleggers — they refuse to spend the extra money in order to make a run of Canada-friendly packagaing.
This is bad news for low-carb snackers in Canada. Companies like Keto and Atkins (yes, as in Dr. Atkins, who I still think was offed by the grain and sugar lobby, whom I refer to as Big Carbohydrates) are still small speciality companies and haven’t gotten around to making bilingual labels for the Canadian market. After a few months of availability in health food stores here in Accordion City, these products are now getting turned back at the border until their packaging becomes compliant. Atkins products will be available in bilingual packaging — in September. Whatever stock is currently in the stores is all that there will be for the rest of the summer.
Time to stockpile the Ketch-A-Tomato®!
Some jackass has already bought up the entire stock of Atkins chocolate and peanut butter protein bars from the health food store closest to my house. That good-for-nothing greedy pig-dog! Those were my favourite!
Luckily for those of us who still like a low-carb chocolate fix, the best of the bars — the Odyssey, which tastes like a Snickers bar and has none of the chalky taste normally associated with protein bars — comes in a bilingual wrapper.
Are the new low- and no-carb breads, beers, and sweets any good? Slate reviews some low- and controlled-carb products.
Two studies vindicate the Atkins diet — but does the weight loss last? An Associated Press story says that the weight loss does happen, but it doesn’t look like the results last. It is supposed to be a lifetime thing, people…
Atkins diet is more effective and healthier than rival regimes, say medical researchers. From The Independent. The story also mentions that Jennifer Aniston and Courtney Cox Arquette are Atkins-ites.
“I’m happy to be out of my Gap clothes and back in my old Armanis, which in the interval became vintage Armanis.” — a quote by Jill Krementz, photographer and wife of author Kurt Vonnegut, who has lost nearly 40 pounds on the Atkins diet.
In all the confusion and aftermath of having a handful of clients for whom I’m doing programming work and the whole Girl Who Cried Webmaster/Blogs Save Lives incident, I almost forgot that I was only beginning to write about the Worst Dates Ever. I was reminded of this by the way the blog See The Donkey links to me — it uses part one of the story as an example of the writing here on The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century.
Not only that, I missed the 4-year anniversary of said disaster. I should come up with some kind of commemorative cocktail.
Anyway, I’m working on the rest of the story in between work and play. Expect it soon.
While it’s always been possible to check out who links to me by combing over the logs recorded by my Web server, I’m glad that services like Technorati exist. They do all the dirty work of seeing who links to whom, and it’s a great way to discover new blogs you’d otherwise miss. Every day, I use Technorati to see which blogs are currently linking to me as well as the context in which they are doing so.
One such blog — with which I was unfamiliar until today — is See The Donkey, a blog owned by one Lee Zanello, a Canadian currently teaching English in Osaka.
(I have a very special relationship with Osaka, Kyoto and southwestern Japan. Kansai International Airport, which is in the area, is my traditional stop-over airport for my trips to Manila. My visit there, almost five years ago, marks the beginning of a period where my life got incredibly interesting after a couple of years’ worth of doldrums and has stayed that way. I may have to write about it sometime.)
According to See The Donkey the Symantec Web Security software behind which Lee surfs at the office refuses to allow this blog to be seen. Instead, it displays this little message:
This page will not be displayed because it contains prohibited words or it has exceeded its tolerance of questionable words.
What the fuck?!
(Oh c’mon, you knew I was going to say something like that, and I’m sure you still smirked.)
Yes, I do swear on the blog from time to time, but only when appropriate; sometimes it’s necessary when quoting someone, and other times, a swear word is le seul mot juste. That being said, I also feel that if you overdo it, either in your speaking or your writing, you’re simply admitting to the world that you’re an inarticulate boor following the path of least resistance in Anglo-Saxon word patterns. I don’t mind if people swear, but I do worry that many of my friends seem incapable of switching to a more polite mode when necessary.
(It’s true about swearing being the path of least resistance: someone once wrote a program that created random three- and four-letter words, with the probability of letters appearing being set equal to the frequency of their use in the English language. The “seven words you couldn’t say on TV” came up a lot.)
C’mon, Symantec, am I really that potty-mouthed? Is this some kind of payback for the time I told a room a Java developers that Symantec Visual Cafe was not software to be tossed aside lightly, but hurled away with great force?
Poopyheads.
The old Infocom text adventure game The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Galaxy has been converted into a Java applet and put online!
The only downside is that since it’s a Java applet, you can’t save and restore as you play. Whenever you lose the game, you have to start at the beginning. There will be versions that run under Windows and Mac released soon, but they’re not available yet.
(I remember having a helluva time trying to figure out how to get off the Heart of Gold.)
[Thanks to Starjewel for pointing this one out.]