Lock The Stall Door

Tagged as: Gross, Seen-Around, Tip-For-Life, Work Jan 31

There are some things that happen in life that cause you to become speechless. For some, this happens more often than for others. For me, it just happened. What in the world do you say when you walk into a stall and someone is sitting on the toilet doing their business?

Wait a second, something is not right. Oh yeah, I’m not supposed to go into a stall when another person is already in there.

1. “You forgot to lock the door, you ninny.”
2. “Surprise! I’m here!”
3. “How are those TPS reports going?”
4. “Ah ha, THAT’S where the smell was coming from!”
5. “How’s that crossword puzzle going for you?”
6. “Whoa…you know that’s not normal.”
7. “Room in here for another?”

Really, how do you respond to that? You can’t. You’re speechless. This is one for the scrapbook (i.e. the blog). It’s even better when this person is from work and you see them around but don’t actually know them. Super!

Tip for life #2340987: Lock the little latch on the door when you are in a stall

Watching A Whole Crowd

Tagged as: Seen-Around, Work Nov 09

So I just finished traveling for work. It was quite an interesting experience. First of all, I’ve not traveled for work before. Secondly, it was supremely interesting getting to watch this whole slew of people that I would not normally get to watch.

People watching was probably one of the more interesting things that I got to do.

Why do we like to watch people?

I’m of the mind that we (well at least I) like to watch people because we are interested in the human experience. Well that and because very often it’s pretty amusing. Or perhaps at the very heart of the matter, we like to see how we stack up against everyone else that’s around. Sometimes they’re stranger, sometimes they’re scarier, and sometimes they’re just like us. Alright they’re never just like us. We wouldn’t ever want to admit as much anyways.

People are interesting. Even the boring ones. Because the boring ones are very interesting when they don’t know that they’re being watched.

Benefits of people watching

1. Laughter

   You gotta hand it to people, they’ll do some ridiculously hilarious things when they’re unaware that they’re being watched

2. Entertainment

   Just because you forgot your electronic device or book, you’ll still have something to do. Almost no matter where are (unless you live as a hermit in which case this post is not for you).

3. Learn

   Other people have had different experiences in their lives. Perhaps watching them will teach you lessons about how you can be a better person.

4. Smile

   Catch those “cute” moments that nobody was supposed to see. You know, that darling thing that a child did or that self-sacrificing act that someone does for another. It’ll brighten your day and maybe next time you’ll be the one who puts a smile on somebody else’s slightly-creepy-people-watching face.

5. Help

   If you’re not aware or watching, someone could need your help and you would have never known. If you’re people watching, you’re (by definition) aware of your surroundings. So that makes it easier if you see someone getting hurt or in need of your assistence because you’ll see the need and lend a hand, won’t you? Let’s hope so!

People watching is a great thing to do. And it’s even more fun to do when you are surrounded by people that you would not normally be around (as I was this past weekend for my work conference). I didn’t know the vast majority of them, but I still enjoyed getting to watch them. I got to see how they interacted, I got to laugh at humorous things that I saw, and I got to amuse myself even (hopefully nobody really noticed me doing so).

Pull Your Pants Up, Boy

Tagged as: Amusing, Gross, Rant, Seen-Around, Work Oct 05

Alright so we had a fire drill the other day. And it was annoying. The sirens were piercingly loud. I guess that’s good because you don’t want to have your earphones in and listening to music so that you don’t hear the alarm when it goes off. Nevertheless the fact of the matter was that there wasn’t a fire and it did hurt my ears.

When you go down the stairs for the fire drill, it’s mild because nobody is actually trying to get away from a fire. I can only imagine that some people would panic in the case of a real fire and try to run by people. These are probably the same people that need to learn what I have to say On Driving. They’re the ones zooming by, cutting you off, and still getting to the destination not a minute or two faster than you. In a fire drill they’re gonna run as fast as they can, knock people over, and cause general pandemonium. Great.

But those thoughts weren’t the most disturbing of the day.

Many people exited the building (it’s a 5 story one with multiple companies), and as we’re standing in the grass I see someone (from my company) who is standing there with his arms raised. They’re resting on his head. Maybe he was stretching. Maybe he was subtly trying to get someone’s attention. Maybe he was trying to touch the sky. How do I know? But whatever he was doing, all I know is that his shirt was too short (so it raised along with his arms), and his pants were sagging too much. And there was a great view of his man hair (if you know what I mean, pubic hair if you don’t) if you’re into that. But I’m not into that. Not at all. And I don’t know too many people who are. So that made me unhappy and disgusted.

So remember, kids, to pull up your pants. Especially if you’re at work. Especially if you’re raising your arms up and trying to grab birds out of the air. You know who you are.

Getting Outside

Tagged as: Amusing, Life, Work Jul 09

So as someone who is inside of the office everyday, it is quite rare to get to experience what many people do on a day-to-day basis. And that is getting to be outside of a building.

I’m a software engineer, whatever that means. Well I know what that means, but you don’t really care about it anyways. In any case that means that I spend much of my day sitting in a chair in front of a computer. There are some good and bad things about this.

Good: Don’t waste too much energy, not difficult physically.
Bad: Can easily take in more calories than output which leads to fatness and an unhealthy lifestyle. Additionally, muscles can slowly atrophy such that when presented with a life or death situation where you need to grab onto a bar and hold up both you and your loved ones with one arm, you will all fall to an untimely demise.

Good: Do something that you enjoy - problem solving, thinking logically about solutions to somewhat concrete (but not real concrete) problems.
Bad: Get lazy and don’t experience the other many many other good things in life.

Good: Don’t get sunburned, don’t get skin cancer.
Bad: Look like a pale alien unless you actually go out. However, due to being inside and being so pale it would be even easier to get sunburned if sunscreen is forgotten.

All in all, I don’t want to be that person that is always inside and becomes lazy. Good thing for trees that overgrow their boundaries and require chopping!

Oh yeah I was outside over the weekend cutting branches off of trees that were touching the roof. And you know what? It wasn’t too bad. I felt like a woodsman. It’s not going to be a job of mine anytime soon, but I don’t mind finding a little Paul Bunyan in me.

Chopped Returns (In Perl)

Tagged as: Bug-fix, Geek, Learn, Linux, Mac, Programming, Useful, Windows, Work May 16

Files on computers are made up of different characters that are interpreted by whatever it is that you are using. That means that no matter what file it is, it is essentially a string of bytes that are interpreted by the program opening it. This means that your music program tries to interpret whatever file you open with it to be conformed to some audio standards (mp3, wma, etc.). Try to open the same file in a text editor, and you’ll find yourself looking at (apparently) junk characters. But then you’ll realize that the file is still just a bunch of characters.

I bring this up because

1. It seems as if people don’t realize this.
2. I encountered this while writing a Perl script today.

Something else that you should read even if you don’t know what Perl is: Windows and Unix-variants (including Mac OS X and up) do not handle files the same. I’m not talking about Fanaticism (because I’ve already posted about that). Windows uses characters that are referred to as the Carriage Return and Line Feed in order to represent a newline. These names originate because of their original use in the typewriter which actually had a physical mechanism to move. In any case, Unix-variants utilize the line feed character to distinguish its newlines. This can obviously lead to some problems if you use the same files on both systems.

If you don’t know what Perl is then you can fairly safely stop reading this article now because the rest won’t help you much. I know that it was hard for me to find and I’d like to make it available if anyone else so happens to run into the same problem.

While writing a script in Perl today, I had a seemingly strange problem where I would do some processing on my Windows machine and then transfer the file via FTP to a Unix-based server. However I noticed that I had a string that when printed to the screen on my Windows computer would display correctly but would display incorrectly in the file put onto the server. I could not figure this out for quite sometime because it seemed as if some of the lines were printing correctly and some were not. Alright enough explanation. Essentially I thought that the last character was getting chopped off in some way that I did not understand in Perl. However it had to do with Perl assuming that the lines has both a carriage return and a line feed on the lines and then chopping them off when the file was being sent via FTP. The fix that I ended up using was simply a one line regular expression like so (a suggestion from a co-worker):

$output=`some action`;
$output=~ s/\n/\r\n/g;
print $output;
print FOUT $output;

Hope that this helps someone searching for an answer. I know that I would have liked to have happened upon the answer while searching for it.