I generally eschew using my blog to ask for help for stuff, especially since I have pretty good resources at work, but this one has got me stymied: I’ve got a bunch of old 5.25 floppy disks from the old days that I’d like to convert and get rid of. For a while, our test lab had a machine that had a drive but I was too slow in taking advantage of it and now it’s gone. I went down to RePC to look at picking up an old drive to stick in my machine temporarily, but looking at the connector on the back of the drive, I don’t believe I have any controller that would drive one. I suppose I could go through the trouble of buying a ratty old computer just for that purpose and junking it, but, really, isn’t there a better way?

So: anyone know of a reasonable way to get a small number of 5.25 disks converted in the Seattle area? You’d think Microsoft would have some place to do this as well, but I can’t seem to find it. Any MSFT people who know of internal resource, let me know.

And I promise I’ll get back to technical topics “real soon now”…

So out of idle curiosity (suuuure), I clicked on MSN’s link to an article on Maxim’s “Hot 100” issue. Apparently Jessica Simpson is number one (beauty before brains) and there was some kind of link on her name, so I clicked on that, again out of idle curiosity (suuuure). Up comes MSN’s “Celebrity Information” page on Jessica Simpson, and there at the top of her filmography is listed the title “Mort, the Dead Teenager.”

Now normally this would just be funny since we use the name Mort as the name of our VB user persona, but there’s an added twist: I’ve heard of this before. At work, we’ve got this wall that’s got all kinds of ironic Mort-related stuff pasted on it (such as a picture of Morticia Addams or the webpage of Dr. Mort Berkowitz, hypnotist to the stars). Many months ago, I was visiting my usual comics establishment to pick up the latest copies of whatever Alan Moore series I was reading at the time when I noticed something funny in the “cheapo” rack: a copy of some weird comic named, you guessed it, “Mort, the Dead Teenager.” I immediately purchased it for our “Wall o’ Mort” and put it up there after a quick perusal to verify that it was, indeed, as stupid as it looks. The comic lasted maybe a month before someone stole it. I think the thief got what they deserved.

Anyway, I’m stunned that someone managed to supposedly convince Quentin Tarantino to produce a movie based on this totally forgotten, totally forgettable comic book. It kinda sounds like it’ll probably never see the light of day, but still…

Weird. Maybe I should have held on to the comic…

Over on Carl’s blog, he waxes enthusiastic about some NPR shows including This American Life and asks, “Anyone else listen to these shows on the weekend?”

I’ll heartily second his endorsement of This American Life. In Seattle, they put it on at 7pm on Fridays, just in time to catch me on my way home. When I first heard it, I thought “what the hell is this weird show?” But then more and more often I would find myself sitting in my car outside of my house with the engine idling, listening to the end of some story or segment. I was hooked, and I highly recommend the show to anyone who’s never heard it before.

The best part about the show is that all the episodes are available on Audible.com for something like $3 apiece. Now when I’m going on a trip, I just buy 3-4 episodes I haven’t heard, burn them onto CD and I have something to listen to on the plane or in the car.

If you haven’t heard the show before, my suggestion is to buy the “Fiascos” episode from Audible and listen to it. The first segment on the Peter Pan production has got to be about the funniest damn story I’ve ever heard. Or buy “First Day” and listen to the “Squirrel Cop” segment. Or just about any episode with David Sedaris. Really, it’s great…

I just wanted to bid a public farewell to Cameron, who’s leaving the team to head off to Japan to learn Japanese and, oh, yeah, hang out with his girlfriend who just happens to live there. I’m very sad to see him go – Cameron’s been a major part of the team and it’s been a lot of fun working with him. His technical expertise and skills will be sorely missed and, well, if things don’t work out in Japan, he’s always got an invitation to come back. (Although we’re all hoping that things do work out in Japan.) I have a lot of respect for someone who’s willing to take the plunge and go after something that they really want to do, even if it means giving up something that they really like doing and feel secure in.

Best wishes to Cameron, good luck, and looking forward to further blog entries!

So my wife’s been working out with a personal trainer at the health club we belong to through work. Yesterday, we get a call from the trainer saying that she can’t meet with Andy because we cancelled Andy’s membership with the health club, which is odd because we hadn’t. So I called the health club this morning and they told me that they cancelled my wife’s membership because Microsoft told me that I was cancelling my membership! So I called the Microsoft benefits line and they informed me that they cancelled my health club membership because the HR system says that I’m resigning from Microsoft this Friday!

Is there some memo I didn’t get?

I’m sure that some wires got crossed somewhere between me and Paul Vijijlkj or whoever is quitting on Friday and it’ll all be straightened out in short order. But it’s just another Brazil-esque reminder of how technology can take on a life of it’s own. Glad I figured this out through the health club ahead of time and not when my next paycheck didn’t show up or my cardkey stopped working…

…nothing arrives for a long time and then a bunch of them show up together. (Apologies to Alan Moore for the corrupted quote.)

I was having a nice, leisurely week getting caught up but couldn’t think of anything inspiring to write about to save my life. Then I go and get very ill (ending up briefly in the ER to get rehydrated because it was after hours at the doctor’s offices, happy, happy, joy, joy) and I find lots of interesting things to blog about showing up in my inbox. Feh.

The fever seems to have broken (knock on wood) and some of the other fun aspects of whatever virus I’ve got seem to have passed, but I’m still only partially here. I’ll see if I can catch up some this weekend…

I could have written a comment on Raymond’s blog about his dis of Krispy Kreme, but then I thought I’d write a full fledged entry. He says:

I don’t understand the appeal of KK donuts. They have no flavor; it’s just sugar.

…and with that, Raymond proves that he did not grow up in the South. First, it is a maxim of Southern cooking that anything that tastes good with sugar will taste even better with lots more sugar. Case in point: iced tea. Frankly, I don’t know how the rest of the world manages to drink tea without a ton of sugar dumped in it. My mom’s recipe for iced tea? Make about a quart of tea and then dump in 3/4 a cup of sugar. Sure, what you get tastes more like sugar water than tea, but that’s the point. Southerners would pour raw granulated sugar down their throats if their stomachs could handle it… Which, now that I think about it, may explain Krispy Kremes…

Of course, the reality is that my opinions of Krispy Kremes, like Raymond’s opinions of Dunkin Donuts, have been bred in. Growing up in North Carolina, home of Krispy Kreme, I’ve been eating those suckers since I was a kid. Nothing says “home” like Krispy Kreme, which is why the KK stores opening up in the Pacific Northwest have induced a kind of cognitive dissonance every time I drive by them. (It’s also weird to see stores that are so new… I’m more used to stores that are so old my parents went to them as kids. I also think those older machines make better doughnuts, but I could be wrong on that.) Now if we could just get a damn Chick-Fil-A franchise opened up in Seattle, I’d never have to go home to see my parents again!

I will have to admit, though, that Seattlites were totally out of control when the first KK opened in Issaquah. There were, like, hour long lines at 4 in the morning. People would ask me, when they found out I was from a state that already had Krispy Kremes, “are they really that good?” My answer was always: “They’re really good but, hey, they’re still just doughnuts.”

(I will add that my parents are safe – I’ll continue to visit them until Bullock’s Bar B Que starts licensing franchises! Mmmmm…. hush puppies…)

While catching up on the blog entries from when I was gone, I ran across Julia‘s second-hand link to a flash version of Tom Lehrer’s The Elements song and I thought I’d pass it along as well.

I discovered Tom Lehrer when I was nine years old and in the fourth grade, which sound incredibly strange to me now but didn’t seem so strange at the time. My best friend at the time, Tom Kraines, got the LP of That Was the Year That Was from God knows where and he made a tape of it for me. I would have to say that 90% of the humor of the album went completely over my head (I had no idea was genuflecting was, to say the least, or nearly any of the political references) but we thought the songs were hilarious nonetheless. From there, of course, we went on to An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer and the rest was history. (The Oedipus Rex song still cracks me the hell up.)

The funny part of it all is that many things that I learned about from Tom Lehrer’s songs made no sense to me until some random point later in my life. The Elements and the last bit of Clementine were just funny bits to me until I discovered Gilbert and Sullivan in high school. And I was totally shocked when I got to Yale and first heard my new alma mater (Bright College Years) and The Whiffenpoof Song, realizing finally what the old Harvard man was lampooning in Bright College Days. (Now I know where the “tables down at Mory’s” are…)

Anyway, it’s one of those cherish bits of flotsam and jetsam from childhood, so…