It's illegal in the state of Connecticut to sell beer that has the image of Santa Claus on the label. (Sec 30-6-A31a, pp 89). Which means you can't sell this:
Bwahahahaha!
I added a link to my wishlist for friends and family that feel compelled to continuously ask me what I want for Christmas. Probably compelled because I never have an answer when they ask…
PS My wishlist is in the right sidebar of this blog, near the search bar.
My wife was on national television this morning, on Good Morning America. Apparently they mic'd her grandparents (Bob and Coke Hough) to talk about Julianne's second Dancing with the Stars win. My wife was standing behind them. I missed all this because we had serious network problems in the office.
For some odd reason, we lost power in the entire building and our router was the first thing to go down, so none of my downtime notifications got to me. Also, our new router's config was completely borked and had to be rebuilt. Luckily I'm smart and hung on to a hard copy of the working config for just such an occasion.
Anybody remember Men Without Hats? They were a two-hit wonder band in the 80s. I was talking to my wife about their The Safety Dance song, and we were talking about how their music video had a dancing midget with a jester hat (awesome!).
So I got to thinking about how different that was, then realized it was nothing new:
Dancing midgets for teh win!
Tonight is the "big finale" where Lorien's cousin Julianne is competing on Dancing With the Stars. I'm going to the finale party here in Cd'A for the free pizza, though, and not because I throw away several hours a week in watching reality TV.
We got our first real snow last night. Along with it, most of the people in this area forgot how to drive.
Or perhaps they never knew how to in the first place…
Drive slower, people! You are not immune to ice because you have 4 wheel drive or snowtires.
I think I have superblood—+15 clotting or something. Nearly every time I go to donate blood (today was blood day for me), I have problems towards the end of the donation with blood flow. I start out fine but for some reason the bag just takes forever to fill up the last little bit.
Because of this, I often get the "adjustment", where they dig around your inner elbow with the needle looking for fresh blood. This often leaves very interesting bruises. But it's all for a good cause.
I recently found out that Barbara Hambly wrote a third book in a series I first read probably 20 years ago that I never knew about. I thought there were only two Antryg Windrose books (The Silent Tower and The Silicon Mage), but it turns out that 15 years agio she wrote a third book entitled "Dog Wizard" and I just never knew about it. I finally got my hands on a copy and will probably be rereading the entire series. Just more for the pile…
Last night was the free public Messiah concert we've been practicing so long for. It went well, and I'm very glad to have my Thursday evenings back. It was a difficult piece to perform, but we did all right. Next year it will be easier, though. My biggest concern was we never rehearsed with the symphonette until the morning of the performance, which I was quite worried about, but it went okay. Mistakes were made all around, but hopefully the public didn't really notice but got the message we intended instead.
Something funny happened today, but I forgot what it was. Just laugh, I promise it was funny.
Today we held a company auction where we got rid of a bunch of things we weren't going to use anymore. We had about 18 laptops, a bunch of miscellaneous stuff, and lots of donated items employees brought in. We're donating proceeds to local Holiday charities, so it was all for a good cause, although I didn't buy anything. It was fun, though, and lots of people bought stuff. I'm glad many got to buy laptops, I don't think any of them went for more than $300, some for $225. I made a giant gavel since we couldn't find one anywhere. I'll have to post a picture of it, it's pretty cool. My boss wore a bright pink bowtie, too, that was a first I've ever seen.
Don't try to search for auction on the internet—you probably won't find what you're looking for.
Our consumer software product just beat out our biggest competitor and became #1 in NPD dollar values for the first time ever in October! We've been #1 NPD in unit sales, but the dollar one was our goal. We just had a big party about it. Woohoo!
Next Saturday, November 24th, there is a free concert being held at NIC's Schuler Auditorium. There will be a symphonette and a choir performing Christmas selections from Handel's Messiah.
You can pick up your free tickets at area Super 1 Food stores, they should be at the Customer Service desk now. Get them while you can because they will go fast.
The concert is not recommended for people with young children that can't sit in one place for at least an hour. My wife and I are both in the core choir. There will be a short rehearsal earlier that day for members of the community that wish to "sing along" with us for certain pieces, but I don't have any information on that. Our first practice was held in June, so we've been working real hard on it. Please show up.
I've been working on a project at work to process information imported into a SQL database through a front-end that isn't terribly configurable. So I have to glue all the data together in a long string, and then import it, then un-glue it and put each bit where it belongs.
I wrote a PHP script to do what I need. It works great, and has excellent error logging and runs fast. In fact, I was processing 2,000 records in about 8 seconds on the average. Today I processed somewhere around 70,000 records.
When I said it works great, I meant the program. The import, however, is subject to human error. As I was running this script, I'd run across records that were imported incorrectly, mislabeled, or otherwise generally borked. I had to fix those manually, there wasn't really any pattern to them.
I did, however, find another problem lurking in the database and wrote a small query to fix it. So while I trounced through the bowels of our SQL server and moved a bunch of stuff around, I did leave it in better condition than I found it…