Dead Computer
As if I didn’t have enough going wrong in my life right now, I think my computer may have just died for good. It won’t turn on–just flashes alternating colors on the screen, and from what I’ve been able to Google, that’s almost certainly a serious hardware problem.
What’s next, I get fired?
Personal | Comment (0)Home for the Holidays
I’m back up in Ithaca for the holidays. Posting is likely to be sporadic until the new year. Of course, “posting” lately has been basically nothing but me whining about the betrayal and the breakup, so I can’t imagine anyone minds too much.
Anyway, to steal a page from the Simpsons, I want to wish everyone a merry Christmas, a happy Hanukkah, a kwazy Kwanzaa, and a solemn and respectful Ramadan.
Personal | Comment (0)What If?
What if I never really fall out of love with her, and pine for her while she moves on with her life?
What if memories of her betrayal and the horrible pain it caused mean that I can never really trust another girlfriend?
What if this was my one shot at real happiness, and now it’s gone?
Funny visual effect
My whole department is moving to another floor, and I’m packing up my crap today. Part of that is pulling things off of my walls. I just pulled down a couple of pieces of paper that had normally been right at the edge of my field of vision when I was looking at my computer screen. It’s just a blank white wall where the sheets used to be.
And it’s the funniest thing: now, when I look at my computer screen, I feel like there’s a little blind spot in my vision where those sheets used to be. I have to look over at the wall to remind my eyes that it’s not a blind spot, it’s just a white wall. It feels really weird.
Musing, Work | Comment (0)Link: FoodieBytes
This seems kind of cool: A food website where you tell it what you’re interested in eating (like “macaroni and cheese”) and it shows you the menus of restaurants that have that item on the menu.
Food, Links | Comment (0)I Deserve Better
If only that made me feel any better.
And, of course, Christmas was such an amazing person, that if she can betray me, then anybody could. So how do I know that I’m ever going to get what I “deserve”?
Starbucks
For all that people gripe about Starbucks destroying the “neighborhood coffee house”, they forget that most neighborhoods never had coffee houses before Starbucks came along. A finding that will surprise many people, from a recent NYTimes article:
News | Comment (0)Clark is frank about his bias: “Starbucks diminishes the world’s diversity every time it builds a new cafe, and I can’t help but feel troubled by this.” But when Clark looks at whether the towering Mount St. Helens that is Starbucks, with its volcanic eruptions of store openings, has buried the competition, he has the grace — not given to every pundit — to look at what he’s actually seeing. Clark informs us that in 1989 there were 585 coffee houses in America. Now there are more than 24,000. Fifty-seven percent of these are what Clark calls “mom and pops.” “Paradoxically,” he writes, “the surest way to boost sales at your mom-and-pop cafe may be to have a Starbucks move in next door.”