Swans on Tea

Blake’s mention of a “First Night” celebration in Boston, coupled with memories of many stories about similar celebrations in upstate New York (Albany and Saratoga), have triggered this.
The problem: “First Night” celebrations are held on New Year’s Eve, which is the LAST night of the year. I mean seriously, WTF? After midnight, [...]

Whoever called a little while back, woke me up and asked me, “Who is this?”
I hope you get your own special circle in Hell. Screw you.
(Phone calls in the middle of the night are invariably bad news. Either a wrong number, or some sort of emergency. Either way you’re jolted [...]

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However, our records indicate [...]

Body still on west-coast time, but with an east-coast schedule. There is much caffeine in my future.
Thoughts from this past week:
Airline travel really sucks. There is no space in coach, and the seats are really uncomfortable — my back still hurts. Next thing you know they will charge for air.
Note to TSA [...]

Chad’s got a post up about how Baseball Statistics Are Crap. I’ve got a different beef.
(There are, certainly, a lot of dubious statistics in baseball. I just don’t agree that things are as bad as Chad says but maybe it’s just that I’m used to the idiosyncrasies. I do understand the infield [...]

Greg Laden has some valid beefs in The Truth Is In There
Yes, the LHC people should have disclosed the faulty transformer immediately. It was an absolute mistake not to do so. No disagreement there.
However,
The hubris. It hurts. That these scientists think that they can and should do this is wrong and, frankly, scary. [...]

Assistant to Assistant Professor
I hope people don’t call me elitist when I claim that most people with high school education could easily do administrative assistant job. Primarily all they have to do is keep track of paperwork – like travel reimbursements, schedules, purchase orders, that kind of stuff. It’s not that complicated, but it’s not [...]

OK — beg? No, not so much.
Dell deceived customers, judge says
I have no complaint about any alleged bait-and-switch. It’s this:
“Our goal has been, and continues to be, to provide the best customer experience possible,” spokesman Jess Blackburn said in a written statement to CNN.
Cough, splurt. Get on it, please.
I had the misfortune [...]

Last week I was vacationing in Bills’ country — it’s tough being a Dolphins fan these days, but especially so within an hour or so of Buffalo — getting my fix of hot wings (not hard to find pretty much anywhere these days) and Beef on ‘Weck (still a local phenomenon), which required me to [...]

I’ve been putting up with the new Dilbert website abomination for however long, a couple of months at least, and the fact that Scott Adams is a fellow Hartwick alum doesn’t mean I’m going to cut him any slack — the website breaks the first commandment of web design.
1. Thou shalt not abuse Flash.
Adobe’s (ADBE) [...]

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There seem to be a lot of bureaucratic jobs out there. People shuffling papers around and about, sending them to and fro, ostensibly with a goal in mind of accomplishing some task. Sometimes that task is helping someone else get something done. Somehow, though, there are cases in which the metric by [...]

I went out geocaching in the wonderful weather today. First stop was to check on caches I have placed, in response to a couple of emails from people who couldn’t find them. Sure enough, they had been muggled. One cache almost completely gone — only the lid and the logbook could be [...]