April 2008

When the barista at Starbucks handed me my coffee this morning, the hole in the lid was directly over the seam in the cup. This, I have come to learn, is a recipe for disaster. If the hole is within a centimeter of the seam you are almost guaranteed to experience “coffee drip” on your shirt. Walking into the office with a coffee stain in the middle of your shirt is a rotten way to start a Monday.

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One of my favorite songs is “Radio”, by Alkaline Trio. (mp3, lyrics) My sister got me to start listening to this group a few years ago and I’ve since collected everything they’ve recorded. What’s really funny is that for the longest time I thought it was a beautiful love song. Part of the chorus is — I thought:

I wish you
Would take my radio to bed with you
Plugged in and ready to fall

“What a romantic line,” I always imagined. The rest of the song is so sad, and sounds so angry. But with that one line he’s saying that he wants her to listen to him singing to her as she falls asleep. I thought this for many, many months … until I actually read the lyrics one day. I was so wrong. He’s really singing:

I wish you
Would take my radio to bathe with you
Plugged in and ready to fall

He’s no longer in love with her at all. He wants her to get electrocuted! So. Yeah. Totally changed the song for me. Still a great song, don’t get me wrong. But completely different. Talk about misheard lyrics!

Looking for a list of the typical PTO dates for 2008? Yeah, I was, too. Here it is.
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Seek allows for ‘faceted browsing’ of email and looks, pretty much, like the coolest thing to hit email since the @ symbol. It’s Thunderbird only, though. At this point I don’t know if it would be possible for me to abandon Outlook. The email functionality I could take or leave, but the address book and calendar are so entwined in my life there’s no way to chunk them. I need to be able to synch with my iPhone … mumble grumble … <rolls up sleeves> … must to do something …

It’s been ages since I posted an mp3 for you. Here’s a great one for today »
Song of the Moment

Yes, I know not always. But some days it would just be nice if you felt like every now and then you could.

I’d have to say that “the back seat of my car” is somewhere near the top of my list of Places Not to Keep an Alligator.

Congratulations to my little sister-in-law! Last night she was named the State of Florida’s 2008-2009 Seminole County Teacher of the Year!

kelly: You eat cottage cheese?
GatorDVG: never
kelly: Ah. Too bad.
GatorDVG: as far as I’m concerned, it’s just some sort of cheese and spoiled milk combination. two of my least favorite things on the planet.
kelly: Excellent for breakfast and before bedtime. Just the right blend of slow digesting carbs, protein and fat.
kelly: I hear you. People either like it or loathe it.
GatorDVG: and, I can only assume, it’s produced in cottages. that can’t be sanitary.
kelly: They’re very clean cottages though. They sweep them with those handmade brooms, like in fairly tales.
GatorDVG: ahh

For lunch today a few of us walked next door to the new Brazilian restaurant that opened this week. It is literally in the building next to my office, so the bar at The Sampa Grill was the absolute closest place we could go to watch the second round of the Masters. The style is Churrasco, which basically means a tremendous amount of fire-cooked meat. I had pork, chicken, some sausage, and three different flavors of beer beef (typo!). I also had a salad and a bowl of soup. Even though the food was fantastic and all-you-can-eat, at $22 (including a Coke and the tip) it’s a bit pricey to become a lunch-hour standard for us. But it was definitely a nice Friday afternoon treat. Too bad Tiger didn’t seem to be doing so well.

I jumped on the Twitter bandwagon when someone mentioned it to me at SXSW2006, but immediately forgot all about it. I’m starting just now to pay attention to it. It’s nifty. What are you doing now?

Bryan has posted an elaborate examination of the “Play Count” metric used by iTunes. I, too, use the “Play Count” metric as a component of many of my Smart Playlists, so I was interested in his research. I agree with one of the comments on his post, though, and think that iTunes really simply considers a song as “played” and increments the “Play Count” about ten seconds prior to the end of the song. (It would be interesting to know if the “Cross Fade” option affects this. Maybe Bryan can investigate …)

In most of my smart playlists, the “Last Skipped” metric is more important than the “Play Count”. I have a “base” smart playlist which I include in almost all my other smart playlists. It contains all the tracks which I do not want to include. If a track is a music video, or holiday music, or from an audiobook or podcast, for example, I don’t want it to play while I’m jogging along Olympic Boulevard or doing the laundry. Consider this my Exclusion list.

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This weekend I finished reading Busting Vegas by Ben Mezrich, the same guy that wrote Bringing Down the House. It’s pretty much the same story: M.I.T. math geeks take on the gambling industry. David and Goliath, etc. It’s a good, quick read. I’d definitely grab Bringing Down the House first, though. It was much more in-depth and — although both are allegedly true stories — it felt much less like a fictionalized account. “Busting Vegas” tends to focus more on the relationships and touchy-feely parts of the story; there are chapters written by the author in the first person and there’s a smallish love-story sub-plot. Either way I should warn you that the chances of learning any magic Blackjack skills and winning big are slim. But it’s still a fun book and perfect for reading while you’re on the beach this summer baking in the sun.

On Saturday night Kelly and I played in a “Nite Lite” golf tournament at Porter Valley. One word: Awesomeness. The format was a Texas Scramble, which basically means everyone hits a ball and then decides who had the best shot. Then everyone hits from there as if that was his shot. We got to use two or three of my drives and several of my other shots, so that was heartening. The sun was gone from the sky by the time we started the back nine and it was just about pitch black, so we had glow-in-the-dark balls and neon necklaces and little glowing ropes on the carts. It’s quite amazing that nobody was killed.

Because there were so many groups we started on the 5th tee. Every fourth or fifth hole had a theme. The first tee was margaritas and fajitas and tacos. The fifth was ribs, chicken, and rum drinks, etc. The best was probably the 10th hole, with chocolate brownies, scotch, and cigars and coffee. One of the holes was cheese and crackers and wine. Our last hole was, if I remember correctly, fourteen; we finished the night with Italian sausages and beer. This was not an evening for the intestinally weak. Lots of photos, of course, posted to Flickr.

Ryan has finally posted a gallery of photos of the painfully cute Madeline Tober.