The Blog Phenomenon – I guess I’m not alone…

Talk about anticlimactic – I opened the box Friday as I left work, and it was empty. Perhaps Jerry just needed a box. Or perhaps Jerry left the box. Or perhaps someone stole the G4 and left the box. In any event, the box was in the dumpster thingy this morning. While this doesn’t answer the question of whether a Macintosh is worth stealing, it does generally indicate that the people here at CIS are kinda messy, since we all walked past this piece of trash for days and no one saw fit to do anything with it.

Yesterday when I got off of work I walked down the two flights of stairs and exited the Teague building. There’s this concrete bench right next to the door and on it was a box for a G4 Power Mac tower. – the gray translucent ones. It had a pink post-it note on it, something about Jerry picking it up. I left sorta late yesterday (~5:10 PM) and there was no one around. No one guarding the box or sitting near it. I naturally figured it had been left for Jerry and Jerry would be along soon, though he was obviously running late and the person who put it down there was either in the bathroom or couldn’t afford to wait any longer.

It’s kinda like when you walk past a car that’s parked in a no-parking zone and it’s still running. I walked past one yesterday. Here at A&M the parking cops are like the Gestapo and it already had a ticket on it. That means that the person had left the car there long enough, with the keys running, long enough to get discovered by PTTS, get ticketed, and the PTTS officer leave already. Suddenly I thought it might be funny if someone were to get in the car, drive it about ten blocks, and then leave it, still running. Better yet, drive it way the hell off to one of the parking lots on campus and park it. I wonder how long it would take for the owner to find it.

So by this same logic, I figured someone was bound to steal that G4 if it was left there long enough. I don’t like Macs, but if the perfect opportunity came up for me to get a free one, I’d take it. Not to say that I would have stolen that G4 – I don’t have what it takes to steal something like that – I was just thinking it might be interesting to suddenly have a Macintosh. Might make any Mac bashing have a leg to stand on

Well, here’s the funny part – when I came to work this morning the G4 was still there. In fact it’s after 4:00 now (see above) and it’s still still there. That means it’s been there close to 24 hours at least. People walk by it, see it, ignore it, etc. Lucky it didn’t rain last night, though my car did have a nice layer of ice on it this morning – perhaps the little translucent case has dew in it now, kinda like when you accidentally diswasher a thermal mug that’s not dishwasher safe. I don’t know what this says about Macintoshes – is it that they’re not even worth stealing, or is it that the kinds of people who would want them aren’t the kind to steal? It would be foolish for someone that works here to steal it – everyone would see him. However, all night long that box went without anyone touching it. Surely someone was here at 3AM and thought about it… or did they?

Of couse the flaw in all this is that I’m not 100% certian if there’s anything actually in the box – I didn’t nudge it to see if there was anything in it. It might be an empty box. Perhaps it wasn’t an empty box last night but it is this morning. Granted, why anyone would leave the box behind is beyond me.

In any event I’m sure that box will be gone Monday morning, because if it isn’t I’m going to have one hell of a laugh.

“C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows away your whole leg.” — Bjarne Stroustrup

True Dat.

I know I’m not really the right generation/mindset for Pink Floyd but I’m listening to them nonetheless. I’ve always enjoyed their album The Dark Side of the Moon but that’s the only real album I’ve ever heard of theirs (I had always heard that that album and the follow-up Wish You Were Here were the only good albums they ever did – the rest were mostly crap). So now I’m listening to Echoes, the latest in the long line of greatest hits cash-ins that flow from the record industry (considering that the Eagles’ Greatest Hits is the best selling album of all time, this is a no-brainer) and I’m listening to this song on it called “Echoes” – it’s seventeen minutes long. It’s like four minutes of song, ten minutes of bizarre conceptual acid trip, and three more minutes of song. They literally just pick the song back up as if it was a freaking guitar solo. Unbelievable. Only Pink Floyd could get away with that.

Weird discovery of the day – apparently the man who played Wyatt in the movie Weird Science is a English professor at Texas A&M. “Your assignment this weekend is to read chapters 4-7 and to avoid the Comedy Central movie.”

The Grand List Of Console Role Playing Game Clichés. I guess they are kinda all the same…

Anyone who knows me knows I’m a big Stephen King fan. I have most of his books, thanks to an on-again, off-again affiliation with the Stephen King Book Club and some visits to Half Price Books. I must confess I haven’t read them all, or even half of them. There are several reasons for this – his books tend to be long, I’m not as strong a reader as I would like to be (unlike my Wife, who can devour tomes in a day), I don’t have as much free time as I would like (ASP and Torque won’t code themselves, you know) and mostly I’m lazy. Still, whenever I do get a chance to read I do like King’s work. It’s not Shakespeare but it’s fun.

So I read now that he’s retiring. On the one hand that sucks – no more new stuff. But then again it took him 30 years to write all these books, and at the rate I’m going it might take that long to read them all, so it’s not as if it’s a huge loss. Plus he’s retreading old ground – the forthcoming From a Buick Eight is Christine again (both about psycho cars). Dreamcatcher was IT again (both about groups of friends with psychic connections in Derry, Maine), etc. King wants to retire on the top of his game, like the Neil Young lyric “Better to burn out than fade away”.

Hell, part of me wants him to retire – he can almost churn these things out faster than I can read them. He claims he has five books left – From a Buick Eight, a short story compilation called Everything’s Eventual, and three more entries in the Dark Tower series. However, that seems like an odd note to go out on – some speculate that he’s not counting EE and there will be another unannounced book as a “last caress”. As of now even his agent doesn’t even think he’ll retire (this is apparently not the first time he’s announced something similar). Still others believe that King will continue to write, we just won’t see it. He reportedly has a number of books he’s never finished. Some of his biggest bestsellers have rested on a shelf for years because they were headed somewhere King didn’t like. He comes back to them later, pitches out the last part he didn’t like, and finishes them. Perhaps he’ll write books with posthumous publication dates – it is rumored that J.D. Salinger (The Catcher In The Rye) has written a sequel to his lone book, to be published after he dies (he’s currently living in seclusion). Still another theory says he’ll publish occasionally – under a pseudonym, something he did for a while as Richard Bachman, until someone figured him out.

In any event, I’m sure he’ll have fun.