Apr 02

Saucy

I love sauce.

Not in the way that I love my wife or my country or donuts, but pretty close. Not all sauces, but quite a few of them. I only noticed it the last time we were at China Dragon, which ranks up there with wife and country and donuts. China Dragon has this amazing dumpling sauce, which is made from soy sauce, garlic, vinegar, sugar, and I think fish sauce. CD also has the best sweet and sour sauce in the world, and when I run out of edible Chinese objects to dunk in it I have actually been known to directly imbibe a few spoonfuls.

I kind of wish they sold it in pop cans.

 

Mar 31

Thanks, fatties

So because America decided to be a nation of big fat fatties, I can’t get a soda at work.

Back in 2009 my company cracked down on smokers, eliminating the last on-site outdoor smoking area, and relegating smokers to the bus stop across the street. I wondered how long before they cracked down on other vices, and it began at the beginning of the year–you can no longer purchase any soda on campus that isn’t a diet soda.

I don’t actually drink much soda any more. I used to drink between one and three a day, but now I might have one every one to two weeks, and even then I can’t even finish it usually. But sometimes all I need is just a little jigger of real soda, and no quantity of diet soda will satisfy that craving.

At least I can still get various forms of sugar-filled carbohydrates at several locations on campus.

For now.

Mar 29

What She Says, What She Means #1

whatshemeans1

Mar 27

Event ID 4010 with LPR printing

If you ever have to set up LPR printing through Microsoft Windows, you may experience a problem where the print job leaves the host computer, hits the print server, but doesn’t make it to the printer. Checking the event log on the print server may return the following error:

“The Line Printer Daemon (LPD) service could not satisfy the request from x.x.x.x, most likely because of network problems. Check network connectivity between the two computers.”

If you check the Microsoft Windows Server Technet article, Microsoft suggests the following:

  •  The printer IP address or subnet is wrong
  • There are DNS problems

The other possibility, which Microsoft fails to mention, is that you have to check one important option when configuring the port on printer on the host computer:

configure-port

configure-lprYou must check the ‘LPR Byte Counting Enabled’ checkbox. This excellent article explains why.

 

Mar 24

Yes, literally

A couple of years ago a guy who worked for me had a toe thumb. I mean, he literally had a toe for a thumb–his big toe, to be specific. He had gotten his hand caught in a wood chipper and had lost parts of most of his fingers and his entire thumb. Doctors removed one of his big toes and grafted it in so that he could have an opposable digit. I thought it was pretty brilliant. He was a great worker, and he had the biggest thumb on Earth.

I tried explaining this to my students, and one of them wasn’t getting it.

ME: I have a guy who works for me who has a toe thumb.

GIRL: Wow, he must have a really big thumb.

ME: Well, yeah, he has a toe for a thumb.

GIRL: (totally not getting it) I know someone who has a really big thumb, too.

ME: No, this guy literally has a toe for a thumb.

GIRL: This guy I know, his thumb is–

ME: NO, this guy lost his thumb in a wood chipper and they surgically attached his toe where his thumb used to be.

GIRL:  (finally getting it) You mean a real toe?

I have seen this creeping into the written word as well. Two books I have read recently both suffer from this affliction. In one author’s book the phrase ‘literally eating each other alive’ is so far removed from any context of cannibalism that I can still discern the meaning. The other author, however, uses ‘literally’ twice in two pages. The context of the first one seems to suggest actual literality–but the context of the second one is fairly ambiguous, and rendered even more ambiguous by the first one.

While I was at a conference last week the conversation turned to my peeve, upon which I was declared a grammar-Nazi, until I persuaded them to use ‘grammar fascist.’ Upon returning from vacation, I found this link at Galleycat (via One Foot Tsunami) similarly decrying this sloppy abuse of the word.

It’s sad that the one word that most accurately means literally has now come to mean ‘completely opposite of literally.’  This is called, among other things, an auto-antonym, but I prefer the word ‘antagonym.’

 

Mar 22

Overheard: 40 yr old youth pastor

“There’s no such thing as a bad short sermon.”

Mar 20

Griftin’ and griftin’

“Excuse me, sir, but I’m from Atlanta, Georgia, and my ex-wife passed away and I’m on my way to Omaha, Nebraska to pick up my girls and I need some gas and they kicked me out of that gas station over there so if you could spare some gas….”

Look, buddy, I guess you think people out in the sticks are easy and gullible. It’s really pretty easy to spot a grifter:

  1. They call you ‘sir,’ –an appeal to pride.
  2. They have this impossibly terrible situation that involves the welfare of children, –an appeal to sympathy. My favorite is the one where the guy has run out of gas and he had to leave his kids in the car with the doors locked while he went to get some gas. My pastor’s favorite is the one where the guy came by the church looking for money to feed his kids–twice. The first time he claimed to have 5 kids, and the second time he claimed to have 3 kids. Apparently he used this ploy so much that he forgot who he used it on. When my pastor asked him what happened to the other 2 kids, and informed him that he had already tried this one–he didn’t want to talk about it anymore and left.
  3. They claim to want gas or food, but the fact is they really just want money.

So get back in your ginormous SUV with large chrome rims and low-profile tires and quit trying to bum money from a guy about to drive an hour to work in a 17 year old beat up Chrysler.

Mar 18

TANK

For years I have used and taught a maxim that our Pastor taught me regarding whether or not I should say what I am thinking:

Is it true?
Is it kind?
Is it necessary?

And by “used” I mean “I have tried to use this but sometimes I find myself speaking before I think and then things get ugly not because I said something I didn’t mean but because I totally meant it I just didn’t mean for it to come out of my mouth.”

Anyway, it’s an excellent list. However, it doesn’t make a good acronym. I guess someone tried to take a whack at it, because my wife asked me recently what the I in the acronym THINK were:

True
Helpful
I
Necessary
Kind

Apparently someone added ‘Helpful,’ of which I approve. I didn’t know the rest until I was moving a computer and someone had it on their wall–the ‘I’ stands for ‘Inspiring.’

I don’t care much for ‘Inspiring.’ If I have cancer, please tell me I have cancer–THNK. But there ain’t no inspiring way to say that.

So I came up with my own:

True
Appropriate
Necessary
Kind

I know what you’re thinking–TANK? Yeah TANK. Because it conveys the idea that words, like tanks, have the potential of both protection and destruction.

What about the H for Helpful? Well, the H is good, but then we get THANK, which I think should be reserved for another character quality like, oh, I dunno, thankfulness. Besides, if you get TANK right, the words will be helpful.

The A is the one that sometimes gets me into the most trouble. Being a teacher, I love to impart information. However, sometimes you gotta learn that just because a person expresses curiosity about something doesn’t actually mean that they want to know the answer–or that you should be the one to tell it to them. I won’t tell you what any of those things are.

That would not be appropriate.

Mar 16

Kansas City Snow Update

For years I have publicly criticized Kansas City and Jackson County for doing a poor/inadequate/shoddy job of clearing snow from their streets and roads, especially when smaller and poorer Lafayette County could seem to get theirs cleared. I make no apologies for that.

However, when I went to work last Wednesday it was Lafayette whose roads were abominably snow-plowed and Jackson whose roads were cleared. Once I reached Independence, the roads were so clear that I-70 looked like it had recently gotten a bit of rain, and not several inches of snow. Awesome job guys.

Mar 14

Overheard: 28 yr old female

“Let’s see if my belly can fit in this way.”