2020.08 minutiae

  • The card reader says:

    INSERT OR SWIPE CARD

    I insert my card.

    CARD READ ERROR
    INSERT OR SWIPE CARD

    I take out my card and re-insert it.

    CARD READ ERROR
    INSERT OR SWIPE CARD

    Inserting has now failed twice.  The screen says I have the option to either insert or swipe the card.  I swipe the card through the magnetic strip reader.

    THIS CARD HAS A CHIP
    YOU MUST INSERT

    I insert the card for the third time.

    CARD READ ERROR
    YOU MUST SWIPE

    I hope that somewhere the ghost of Douglas Adams was shedding a happy tear.

  • I love the way that when my cutting board develops dark spots on its underside from sitting on a wet counter, a little drizzle of bleach makes it good as new.  So when I ran out of bleach, I quickly went to Target to get some more.  No bleach in stock.  Safeway?  Also completely out.  I didn’t know whether the Berkeley Bowl would carry bleach, but I figured it was worth a try.  Not only did Berkeley Bowl have bleach, but it was on sale!  A big jug of bleach was normally $4.79, but for a limited time, it was $3.49.  Then I noticed that aside from the standard bleach, there were scented varieties.  Here were the prices, all for a 7½‑pound jug:

    Plain: $3.49
    Lemon: $3.49
    Lavender: $1.99
    “Floral fantasy”: 99 CENTS

    I got the plain.  I don’t want my cutting board to smell like a floral fantasy.

  • Susan Rice was ultimately not nominated for vice president, but seeing her in the news raised an important question:  Am I the only one who thinks she and Tom Morello look like they could be siblings?

  • There’s a Van Heusen outlet near Sacramento, which I passed when Ellie was thinking of moving there and we took a day trip to check it out.  I decided to stop and see whether I could pick up some of those textured T‑shirts I like.  Good news: because the covids had retail outlets desperate for customers, everything was 70% off!  And the line only had five people in it!  Bad news: after fifteen minutes, the line had not moved at all.  I got bored and gave up.  At home, I ordered a few Van Heusen T‑shirts for full price, i.e., $15.  Now here’s the thing.  On very rare occasions I will be at a Target or a mall or someplace and find a display of regular T‑shirts and will on a whim decide to pick one up, because it’s a color I can’t usually find and the price is good (like $7.99 or something).  The thing is, even though I wear them very rarely, these shirts usually last at most a year or two before they become fit for the rag bin: the neck stretches out, holes start to appear, etc.  Call it twenty wash cycles at the most.  The higher-end textured ones?  Some of these I have been wearing and washing every month for twenty years and they still look like new!  Well over ten times the longevity for only twice the price.  I think this is one of the things people have in mind when they talk about how poverty is expensive.  Having to buy the cheapest stuff is often more expensive in the long run.  Then again, in the long run we are all dead.

  • I seem to have lost some of my ability to sense temperature.  These days I often don’t notice that it’s hot in my apartment until I go to the pantry and discover that my coconut oil has liquefied.  (There have also been days that I’ve found myself dripping with sweat, and wondered, huh, why is this happening?  I don’t feel hot!  And then I discover that the whole time I was thinking that it was feeling maybe a little bit stuffy it was actually ninety degrees in here.)

  • Back in the early ’00s I got a spate of requests from people who asked me when I was going to provide an RSS service so they could learn about site updates without having to visit and see for themselves whether any new content had been posted.  My response was that I didn’t know how to do that and would look into it when I had some free time.  Before I got around to looking into it, social media became a thing, and in lieu of RSS, I just posted site updates on Livejournal (and later Twitter and Tumblr and the other places that came to prominence in subsequent years).  It’s probably been a decade or more since I last heard someone ask me about RSS… so I guess that makes it a perfect time to have finally gotten around to it!  I don’t have RSS for the whole site, but I do for the podcast.  When I did finally look into it I found a bunch of services that purported to automatically generate RSS files for you, but when I looked into them, it seemed like figuring out how to use them would take more effort than just coding the RSS by hand.  So I’ve just been coding the RSS by hand.

  • The night before school started I did not sleep well.  At first I could not sleep because I was nervous about school starting.  Then I could not sleep because I was worried about not getting enough sleep.

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