I love vending machine coffee. I don’t know why. It’s undeniably bad coffee… probably the worst in existence.
It is however, spewed forth by a machine. That’s gotta count for something. At least it will keep me from falling in love with every woman that pours me a cup. Although, I have been known to love my machines.
Today is the day of tiny posts. This being no exception.
Check it out! One of my very talented students drew this. It’s a caricature of me transformed into a robot… a Sambot, if you will. Very cool! The artist, Sean Conchieri (I’m not sure if he has anything online… if so, I’ll post a link) has a promising illustration career ahead of him. You should see some of his more formal work… very impressive.
Thanks Sean!
I blinked and the weekend was over. Whoa. Where did it go? I guess family time consumed it in its entirety. A wedding, Mother’s Day, my little sister’s triumphant (albeit brief) return… and now here I am… again… back at my desk, in my office, soaking up the toxic, cancer causing fumes from this 15-year-old behemoth of a copy machine sitting next to me… that exists only to increase my blood pressure and consequently, shorten my life. (Remember that scene in Office Space where they bring that troublesome fax machine into an empty field and beat the living snot out of it? Oh man… You better watch your back, copy machine. One more paper jam… just one more… and you, me, and my good friend, Smashy McSledgehammer, are gonna go for a ride. Capice?)
Ok… I totally lost my focus. I was planning on posting about this weekend’s events. Boring! Instead, I’ll leave you with the above photo. That’s me, at the wedding, holding my sister’s maid of honor flower thingy, looking off into the distance and envisioning a future where it’s me wearing the billowy white gown and veil. I’ll make such beautiful bride… I mean groom… I mean hansom… er… tux! I’ll be wearing a tux. Arghhh! I have a penis! Really…
Anyway (changing the subject), I sincerely hope that everyone’s Mother’s Day was spectacular. Yea for moms!
Remember the audio cassette? I know you’re trying to forget it, but you know you remember… that rectangular chunk of plastic filled with furlong upon furlong of magnetic media? You know what I’m talking about. Remember what it was like to hear your favorite tape get garbled up by Mom’s car cassette deck? That gasp of horror as you realize that your one-of-a-kind Sam’s Super Driving Mix is about to be lost forever? Remember pulling the cassette out only to find that there is still tape wound intricately around the play mechanism… and the more you pull, the worse it gets? Yeah, I remember the audio cassette. Good riddance.
Considering my loathing of magnetic tape, it’s interesting how I become filled with nostalgic glee while taking a virtual stroll through Project C-90’s audio cassette museum. I’m delighted when I stumble across an audio cassette that I remember. “Oh! I had a TDK Super D. Side A had Slayer’s ‘Reign In Blood,’ and side B had Bad Religion’s ‘Suffer’ and most of ‘Against the Grain!’” or “Yep. The Fuji JP-II. I made a mix on that tape for a girl (what was her name?) that I had a monstrous high school crush on. I think I titled the mix, ‘Songs that make me think of you’ or something equally as lame. As I recall, it was filled to the brim with the likes of Suicidal Tendencies, Anthrax, Iron Maiden, probably some Cannibal Corpse thrown in there for good measure… in retrospect, I might have liked to have thought through my musical selections prior to adhering them to a mix tape whose very creation was intended to instill a sense of romance within the recipient… don’t get me wrong, nothing is more romantic than Maiden’s ‘Die With Your Boots On,’ but… nevermind.” Or, my personal favorite, the Memorex dBS (see photo). Nothing screams late 80’s (early 90’s?) like the superb graphics on this audio cassette. Man, that brings me back…
Want more? Remember… Tape hiss? High bias? Those little tabs that you pull off to write protect the cassette? Remember discovering that you can put a piece of scotch tape over the write protection holes on your sister’s Paula Abdul tape so you can record your friends new Megadeth tape over it… on a dual cassette deck, with high speed dubbing? Auto reverse? The yellow Sony Sport Walkman? Remember having to press the play and record buttons simultaneously to begin recording? Remember pressing the play and record buttons accidentally when you just wanted to press play… and recording 3 seconds of empty space in the middle of your favorite Black Flag song? Remember that non-recordable bit of tape at the beginning of every blank tape, that you forget about every time you go to make a copy, as you cut off the first 10 seconds of the first song?
So many audio cassette memories… what are yours?
There are three class periods left in the semester and I am just now discovering that I have a faculty mailbox. Yep. Good to know. So, I picked up my mail for the first time today. There was a lot of really useful information in there… most of which would have been “really useful” two months ago, and is now only semi-useful (in that padding-the-bottom-of-the-recycling-bin sort of way).
Hmmm. I wonder if there is anything else that I’m missing out on… like an office, or a teaching assistant, or a helper monkey… I’m envisioning a dark hallway in the basement of a random building on campus. There, at the end of the hall sits a lonely door with a placard reading “Sam – Graphic Design.” In front of the door, two rotting corpses. The first, a fresh faced (in that fresh-faced-rotting-corpse sort of way) teaching assistant. The second corpse is really more of a pile of bones than an effective corpse. The teaching assistant probably had to devour the helper monkey in hopes of fending off starvation for as long as possible… god forbid she/he leave the post she/he has so diligently kept… there, covered in monkey entrails, outside the unused office door, alone, in the dark basement hallway…
I wonder if that would negate my eligibility for “Teacher of the Year?” Oh well. Screw it. As long as I get a paycheck…
P.S. I revised this entry like six times. I apologize if your RSS feed reader has been bombarded with what seems to be the same post over and over. “Proofread before you post,” you say? No deal!
Holy bloodclot! My sister is getting married. My little tiny sister is getting married. This is craziness. Pure craziness.
My little sister can’t get married. She’s too… little!?
I talked with her on the phone this morning. She is so excited and happy. And I am so excited and happy for her. Her fiance is really a sweet guy and they compliment each other perfectly.
I cannot believe that my little sister is getting married. I’m in shock. (can you tell?)
Go little sister! Go!
Friday night. 2am. While all the lame kids were out partying and drinking and making-out… I was at home, just like all the other cool kids, unpacking a black box with a metallic X on the cover.
I installed Tiger that night, but I didn’t really get a good chance to play around with the new OS until the following day. Admittedly, I haven’t put as much time into the setup as I should have. This weekend was jam-packed with other crud. But, here are my initial impressions:
1) New subtleties in the look and feel. Good! Especially in the menu bar area. The horizontal stripes up there is a tired look.
2) Automator. Not as exciting or useful as I had hoped.
3) Spotlight. I imagine that this will become a worthwhile part of my workflow… but right now, it’s just a search box.
4) Dashboard. Yes! Very useful, very customizable, and some of the coolest eye candy I’ve seen in a while.
5) Safari RSS. She flies!
Ok… More later. I’m going to install Tiger on my work machine this afternoon. That will be the real test… to see how the striped feline holds up in a fast-paced, full-throttle, graphics environment. Right now, it’s time for some coffee… even though I promised myself that I’d cut down. A wise person once said, “Promises are made to be broken” or was it “Coffee rocks! You should drink more!” Either way, I’m getting a cup.
