7 Quick Takes, Take 15
The original Seven Quick Takes Friday maven can be read here.
:::: 1 ::::
Let’s get the confessions out of the way first: Jenn’s coy little hint is what gave me the extra push to actually write this update. Not that I haven’t been meaning to write for the past couple of weeks, of course, but I’m afraid that I’m fairly intertial about such things.
And of course, you’ll read through the rest of these items and conclude that I shouldn’t have bothered. Or you could just stop here and save 30 perfectly good seconds!
:::: 2 ::::
Speaking of intertia, I just finished uploading the last of my photos of Indonesia a couple of days ago — a mere seven weeks since the trip ended! Take a look at the results here.
A bit of a preview:
I put most of the images I upload to Flickr under a Creative Commons license; I’m happy to have other people reuse them (with proper attribution). There’s also a nice Flickr feature whereby I can the the links people are following to arrive at my pictures. That’s how I discovered one of the strangest reuses so far. One of the photos I took in Sulawesi is now decorating a blog entry about purchasing funeral insurance. Which photo, you ask? Why, this one — a field of waruga, centuries-old stone sarcophagi in which the dead were interred in a huddled sitting position.
I didn’t realize that insurance covered that option.
:::: 3 ::::
Last night I made a low-fat ice cream alternative using evaporated milk and ate an embarrassing amount of it. This morning I realized that I’d pulled the wrong can from the pantry and used a full-fat milk base. Oops. I thought it seemed creamier than usual.
And this comes just one day after hearing a lecture about “mindless eating” by Cornell’s Brian Wasnik (winner of an Ig Nobel prize!).
:::: 4 ::::
The library building where I work is overdue for a major renovation (there are no sprinklers to protect the collections in case of fire, for starters); six months ago, we were fully expecting that, just about now, we’d all be packing up and moving to an undisclosed location so that the upper floors of the building could be completely gutted. The “undisclosed” part was a source of some anxiety because the options would all seem to be less desirable. We’re located right in the heart of campus, with all the conveniences the campus offers right within walking distance — and, most importantly for me, we’re right next door to Sage Chapel with its lovely large pipe organ.
But the economic slump put the brakes on the renovation plans, and I have no idea what’s happening now; they’re mentioned less and less frequently these days. But at least nobody has come along and told me to pack up my office for next week.
:::: 5 ::::
I’m in the middle of rereading C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower series. I think I first heard about the books as a teenager reading about the creation of Star Trek — Gene Roddenberry took elements of Hornblower’s character to create James T. Kirk’s. (Kirk’s serial womanizing came from elsewhere, though.) At the time, they didn’t sound particularly interesting. They’re very good, though.
:::: 6 ::::
I’ve been asked to design and teach a small training program at work. I think I’m looking forward to it. At my previous job, I did a lot of work as what they call a “field engineer”, traveling to random locations to repair or install the scientific instruments we sold. When I was doing a new installation, I usually had to spend a day or so training the purchasers how to use their shiny new device. On the rare occasions when there were no snafus and the machines worked correctly, I rather enjoyed the teaching aspect of it.
Of course, the memory cheats, and when the time comes for this new program I’ll probably stammer and go blank and forget everything I know about Drupal. That’ll teach me.
:::: 7 ::::
I haven’t looked into the details of President Obama’s health care proposal. But if it’s true, as they say, that it includes provisions for mandatory abortion coverage — a new, backdoor FOCA, in other words — then it deserves to fail. There, I said it.
::::::::::::
2 years ago