| Messing with survey people |
[Jul. 20th, 2009|12:32 am] |
I just got a call from a survey company, asking me to rate the quality of some service phone call I'd made recently.
First she asked if I had five minutes to complete a survey about a phone call I'd made recently. I thought that five minutes was longer than the phone call itself, but I felt bad for her, and I was amused, so I agreed to the survey.
"How would you rate the overall quality of the call? Please answer with a number from 1 to 5 where 5 is excellent is 1 is poor."
I answer, "4.6"
[pause....]
"Sir, would you say 4.6 is closer to 4 or closer to 5?"
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH.
I was chuckling the rest of the call, just saying "5." because I didn't want to confuse her. |
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here's one for ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) eyeteeth |
[Jul. 19th, 2009|12:21 pm] |
I can think of no more obvious way to thwart blindness than to yank a tooth, drill a hole in it, incubate it in your cheek for a few months, then stick it in your eye: Osteo-Odonto-Keratoprosthesis. |
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| bjork bjork bjork |
[Jul. 18th, 2009|11:21 pm] |
At Utopia for dinner, and Bjork comes on the house music:
nyxie: Yay, Bjork! From...
mendel: Iceland!
nyxie: ...
nyxie: No, what album?
mendel: Homo... no, it's not "homophobic", what is it?
mendel: Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's not "homophobic".
nyxie: Homogenic!
(Also I am SO FULL OF FOOD.) |
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| Do You Miss Firefly? |
[Jul. 18th, 2009|08:50 pm] |
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Enter Crimson Dark (that link starts at the beginning), an online Web comic. The author freely admits his influence by Firefly and the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica. The art is fantastic (all computer models) and the story line is interesting, too. If sci-fi and Web comics interest you at all, I highly recommend it. Pure escapism. |
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| the forecast is for nostalgia |
[Jul. 17th, 2009|12:18 pm] |
American Apparel brings back the 90s.
The 90s are when I was at the North American Aspirational Age (25) and thus, off limits for anyone else to plunder.
It got me thinking how people will be reviving, say, the early 2000s. I can't even think of any fashion cues or trends that really say early 2000s. Dot com crash? Invading tinpot dictatorships?
Oh I know -- geocaching. Yeah, in 2020 they'll be selling appealingly clunky GPS units, where modern models are probably going to be the size of dust particles and thus built into every hairbrush.
What else? |
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| Things You Don't Expect |
[Jul. 17th, 2009|03:26 pm] |
Talking with a British colleague who mentioned he was at a French restaurant in London with his sister. The waiter came over and asked if their meal was OK and his sister replied, in French, that it was an excellent meal. The waiter apologized, explaining that he was from Indonesia and didn't speak French. So she repeated what she said in Indonesian. The shocked waiter replied that he was actually from Bali and didn't speak Indonesian. So she repeated what she said in Balinese.
Damn. Just damn.
Many people (usually not British or American) speak several languages, but they're usually European or African. Frankly, were I the waiter, I think my brain would have imploded at that point. |
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| To be, or not to be in Denmark |
[Jul. 13th, 2009|07:03 pm] |
Ok, I just announced publicly that I'll be spending all my time on a particular art project, and then this came up.
Dance Dance Immolation is scheduled to run at Smukfest in Denmark in early August. Sadly one of the crewmembers just had to drop out for health reasons.
As far as skillset goes, I'm the nearest replacement. This particular job involves training a bunch of locals to help us run, so even if others have similar skills it's a time commitment they don't want to deal with. Plus I have the time and can afford to pay for the non-refundable expenses.
We are dealing with plane tickets that have to be purchased NOW NOW NOW so I have to come up with some kind of answer for the team pretty damn quick.
Most of this trip is spent in the woods of Denmark with long haired Danish rocker kids, but there will be a day or two in the cities.
I'm leaning towards going but that makes the schedule for my other art project really tight. I still think of that as my first commitment. raindrift argues that my other art project is easy to do, but he's raindrift and a veteran at knocking together bizarre hardware at short notice. This is my first time trying to do something more complex than IKEA furniture. Hm.
Never rains but it pours. |
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| It's that time of year again |
[Jul. 13th, 2009|11:16 am] |
Fire Arts Festival is now a four-day extravaganza starting this Wednesday, July 15th, and ending Saturday July 18th. Interpretive Arson will be there with 2πr.
This is one of the most accessible and fun ways to see a lot of the fire art being done in the Bay Area, in just one evening. It's engineering! Art! And contributes to the warming of our planet. What's not to love?
This year it's held in a space 3x bigger than last year, and there's FREE parking and a FREE shuttle from BART.
Tickets get more expensive as the week progresses, and Saturday is a guaranteed sellout. So get your tickets now, now, now. I'd like to see some of my geek friends out there for once.... |
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| Writing Exercises |
[Jul. 12th, 2009|12:28 pm] |
Yesterday I submitted my first ever fiction piece for publication. I doubt it will get accepted (it is my first submitted piece, after all), but I figured I should try.
Writing non-fiction is easy for me, but fiction is harder. Much harder. However, as any good writer knows, there are three rules to writing: write, keep writing and write more.
I generally have interesting ideas, but my characterization skills are a bit weak and I'm not terribly good at establishing the setting and atmosphere. To rectify that, I have am working through some writing exercises and thought I would share one with you.
The exercise is to pick up a book at random (preferably one you do not know), pull one sentence out of it and, without referring to the context, write keep writing from that sentence, without stopping, three times, each time taking off in a different direction. The sentence I read at random was:
"A man called Bruno seems to be their most colourful victim. Perhaps he chattered with angels too, so to speak."
So let's see how I handle this.
( Playing With Bruno ) |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 10th, 2009|04:29 pm] |
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Hey. I don't post here often anymore. Will be around from time to time. But if I'm not watching you on twitter, reply here (locked as you prefer) or tweet to yoak. I'm not sure I'll stay there either, but I'm doing a little of that. :-) |
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| An "ah well" in the making. |
[Jul. 8th, 2009|09:38 pm] |
Dear Log,
I broke my personal interdict against ever again touching Wikipedia
(except for commas, just maybe), and I actually dared to
reformat something: See.
Let's see how long it lasts before there's a nuclear war about it!
Or rather, let's not see. Call me when the
shwas rain down like fallout. |
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