Beach Photo
Here’s one I can’t resist posting, one of those few pictures of mine that actually looks better as a picture than it did through the viewfinder:
Atlantic City Observations
I’m back from Atlantic City. And can I just say that I’m a huge geek? Who else comes back from Atlantic City with a bag full of books? I came across a library book sale that was selling books for a dollar a bag, and well, I’m only human. Anyway, some random observations:
- The Trump Plaza hotel and casino is hilarious. It’s just so very Trump. If you were to go through the place and remove Trump’s name from everywhere it appears (a daunting task), then drop me in the middle of it and ask me who built it, I could answer correctly without hesitation. It’s like Trump Tower without all the subtlety.
- There are themed slot machines based on I love Lucy, The Munsters, The Price is Right, and–I swear I’m not making this up–Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Year’s Eve. The slot machine makers know who their core demographic is, and they’re going right for them, not caring if they alienate a few younger folks in the process. Which, as an ad guy, I admire; so many companies try to be everything to everyone and end up not standing for anything.
- Every casino has a bunch of restaurants, of course, and one of them is always a steakhouse. Which makes sense, if you think about it: the casinos want to take all of your money. If you lose money, that’s fine, they have it. If you win money, when you’re feeling flush, you’ll want to go get a nice steak dinner, and the casino gets your money anyway.
- Gamblers are a funny, superstitious lot. I saw the same ritual by two different craps players at two different craps tables: the shooter rotating the dice, one face at a time, on the table until the right numbers are face up. It’s hard to describe, and I’m not doing it justice here. Not just turning the dice in his hands until the desired numbers are face up, but going through this careful procedure, flipping the die on the table, until the right number comes up. Actually, thinking back at it, I wonder if there’s some rule, where once you pick up the dice they can’t touch the table again until you throw them? That would account for it.
Atlantic City: Stuck in the Bathroom
So I’m in Atlantic City for a couple of days. I just found out this week that I had two vacation days left over from last year that I needed to use up by the end of the week, or they’d go away. Fortunately, I have a cool boss, who was totally okay with me taking those days this week. I chose Atlantic City because hey, I’ve never been.
Anyway, I’ll post my various random observations of Atlantic City later, but now I want to talk about something that happened right after my arrival. I checked into my hotel, went into the bathroom in my room, and discovered, as I tried to leave, that I was locked in. The doorknob would turn, but the door wouldn’t actually open. Which put me in rather a bind. I didn’t have a credit card or anything on me (remember, I was in the bathroom) to jimmy the lock, and there’s no phone in the bathroom to call the front office. I could bang on the door and yell, but my shouts would have to get through two doors to reach the hallway, and then there would need to be a hotel employee passing by. I was facing the possibility of being locked in the bathroom all day.
Fortunately, there’s a happy ending. The screws that held the doorknob on turned out to be a little loose. I was able to unscrew them with my fingers and dismantle the doorknob mechanism enough to get the door open. But man, what a way to start a vacation.
Travel | Comment (0)Stupid Microsoft Interface
Stupid Microsoft Interface of the Day:
In Excel 2003, if you copy a cell or set of cells, then go and do anything else–modify another cell, for instance–the copy buffer gets flushed, so if you “Paste” nothing happens. You have to go and copy the cells again. This goes against the way copy/paste works in every other application, Microsoft or otherwise, and against the way copy/paste has always worked. Pointlessly violating the way common functions work is about the worst imaginable way to design an interface.
Geek | Comment (0)Google Reader
(Warning! Geeky post ahead.) I’ve always thought RSS was a good idea that didn’t go far enough. The basic problem that it addresses is a real problem–many Web users have a lot of occasionally-updated websites they follow, and it’s a pain to keep checking them to see if they’ve updated. Wouldn’t it be nice, the folks who came up with RSS thought, if you could see just the headlines you haven’t read yet, and be automatically informed when they appear? And yes, it is nice.
The trouble is, most RSS readers are designed assuming you use only one computer. If I follow the same feed on my work and home computers, I can read a set of headlines at work, then come home and still have them listed as “unread”. So I’ve been thinking, lately, that someone should take RSS and include some of the best aspects of IMAP, so that you could mark a headline read on one machine and have it automatically be marked as read on any other computer you use.
And Google is taking a stab at doing just that–it’s called Google Reader. You put in whatever RSS feeds you want to follow, and it shows you only headlines you haven’t read. And since it’s Web-based, it works across computers, so you don’t have to see the same headlines more than once.
Unfortunately, it’s still in Beta, and it shows. Adding new feeds can be slow, and sometimes fails completely. The server occasionally just doesn’t respond. It seems to get posts out of order sometimes, and I’ve read reports of it missing some posts. And it’d be nice if there were a version that worked with my Treo’s web browser.
But still, it’s useable. I put most of my blogroll in there (sadly, a few of the blogs I follow don’t have feeds yet), and it may end up replacing my own Blog Reader program for my daily visits. Give it a try.
Geek | Comment (0)Quote of the Whenever
Quote of the Whenever:
Leela’s Mother: It’s good that Leela doesn’t love us. That way she won’t be sad when we die.
-Futurama
Quote | Comment (0)Painful Shoes
So I had to dress up a bit for a meeting today, and among other things, I put on a pair of dress shoes that I hadn’t worn in a while. It turns out that, since I last wore them, they had changed a bit. Specifically, the part that rubs against the Achilles tendon had changed from smooth leather to razor blades. Seriously: by the time I got to work, my heels were actually bleeding. By then, I didn’t have a choice, though, and I had to go through the day walking as little as possible, because every step hurt.
Important priority: new dress shoes.
Personal | Comment (0)