A funny Internet story… old school style.
A fellow grad student sent me the following story as a means for procrastination. The way it’s written was very amusing.
I “Kid” You Not
After 3 years away from the game, I’ve decided to help coach lacrosse again. Learning from my previous CA coaching experience, I was looking for a club lacrosse team to join to avoid having to commit to the daily grind. I finally found a team close-by that agreed to my ‘time’ demands and got assigned to help coach a U11 team. Today was the first time we had a ‘game’, an unofficial tournament on Treasure Island. Unfortunately, our first game was at 10:30 am and we were asked to meet there at 9:45 am.
I got there bright and early (at least on a weekend for me) and put down my backpack with extra clothing in case it got cold. One of the girl’s parents walked up to me and the conversation went something like this:
Parent: “Hi. I don’t think we’ve met before, I’m (insert name).
Me: “Hi. My name is Joyce.”
Parent: “So which one of these girls is yours?”
Me: “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m an assistant coach. I’m too young to have a 9/10 year old kid.”
Parent: “Oh. I guess I haven’t attend enough practices to recognize you.
So when I got home, I told Emily this story and she preceded to tell me hers.
one time
i was at the belmont permit office
and a guy asked me if my kids went to fox elementary
i was like um
no kids
and then i went home and threw out that sweater
Awesome.
Tip of the Day
Last week I learned some useful tips from a fellow co-worker. He was giving a presentation to our group when someone questioned one of his formulas. So in order to convince us, he decided to derive the equation on the whiteboard. He asked someone else to push the b key on his laptop, which blanks the screen in PowerPoint! We were all amazed since none of us had ever realized that such a keyboard shortcut existed. To return back to the presentation, you just need to push any key and the slideshow will resume. As awe-inspiring as that was, it wasn’t the highlight of the hour.
After proving his formula, he grabbed a eraser. As he was about to erase the equations, he turns to us and says, “You know, when I was teaching in the military, I learned that you should never erase side-to-side. For the first few classes, I would hear snickering when I erased the chalkboard side-to-side. Finally, I asked them what was up and they told me that they were laughing that my butt was shaking. Therefore you should erase in an up-and-down fashion and not side-to-side.” AWESOME. One of the most memorable meetings I’ve had!
Science-Savy
A coworker sent me a link to take a science quiz to determine if I was more “science-savy” than the average American.
http://pewresearch.org/sciencequiz/
Needless to say, evidentally I scored better than 90% of the population (10% of the people had a perfect on it too).
What people messed up on:
Electrons are smaller than atoms. (T/F) – 46%
Lasers work by focusing sound waves (T/F) -47%
I guess people are guessing on these questions since it’s almost the same percentage as a coin-flip.
Spam Attack!
I’m amused by this email that made it through the gmail SPAM filter. Not only am I not associated with the email header description, the instructions are as follows:
Fill the attacked FORM FOR THE 2ND TIME.
Way to tell us what you’re doing there. Not at all obvious…
Tech Support for the Techie
It’s never a good feeling to talk to tech support and feel like you’re more competent at solving the problem than they are. Granted I’m sure there’s a guideline for how to troubleshoot the problem, but I think it just makes me doubt the system more. In the last 24 hours, I’ve made 3 phone calls to Comcast about my Internet connectivity issues, and 2 out of the 3 times I had the impression I was much more knowledgeable than the customer service person.
The first guy seemed to know what he was doing, unfortunately I was also in a rush to leave the house to make it to work so I just verified I could connect directly from my laptop to the cable modem. A work day,a softball game, and a basketball game later, I get home to try it again and I have no success. I get on the phone to call them again and I’m told to unplug everything, and reboot my laptop. Now I question why I need to reboot my laptop, but I’m so frustrated with it that I just do it in hopes that it’ll work. After the modem gets booted up, I power on my laptop and I check my ethernet card to see whether I got a valid IP address. Seemed fine, so I immediately tried to use my router so I would avoid having to call back the customer service. I logged into my router and forced it to renew it’s DHCP license. And was unable to do it. I was forced to reboot everything (why would you need to reboot the modem at this point in time?) and still didn’t have much luck. After hitting that stupid renew several times, my router finally managed to get all the IP information correctly. I thanked her for her time (although really all she did was tell me to reboot all my machines) and hung up with her. Now if only that solved the problem.
Half an hour later, I was still having trouble with the connection. Not only was it a slow bandwidth, but at times I would completely lose connection. I verified it by running a rudimentary speed test, ping google.com. Most of the return times were on the order of 90 ms for the roundtrip, with several dropped ping requests. In addition, the slow bandwidth seemed to make it impossible for me to run multiple tabs on a browser! I called them up to complain about the bandwidth. I tried a ping to google and if the request succeeded, the roundtrip time was 90ms. Not exactly high-speed Internet here. She said, well try a different browser – the speed maybe related to the browser. I was like uhh, well I’m on Safari now, and I tried Firefox previously and they’re both pretty poor. She said oh did you download a new browser to see if you’d have better performance? I told her no, I’ve had the browsers for ages now. Then she asked me to try Internet Explorer, to which I replied ping is browser-independent way of verifying connectivity! It’s not the browser, it’s the stupid connection! So she finally says okay, why don’t we run a speed test. It takes awhile for the speed test to load up (isn’t that another sign that the bandwidth is piss poor?) and when I finally run it, the results back my claim. 2.5 Mbps download, 1.6 Mbps upload. Then she proceeds to tell me that my best bet is to exchange the modem – which I attempt to do at a store near work this morning. It turns out she even got THAT wrong, you can’t exchange it at a store that’s not near your “region.” Argh!
Sunken Short Game
Another beautiful summer day (78 degrees) meant a go-around at the golf course. In an effort to continue to try different places, I went to the Sunken Garden Golf Course. What I learned is that I’m a terrible at judging distance, which is very important when trying to decide which club to use.
On the first tee, the scorecard said it was 162 yards, turns out it was 125! Of course I didn’t realize this until I pulled out my 5 wood, and hit it right over the green… Needless to say, hole 1 was a disaster. Had to take a drop from the edge and therefore had a 6 (+3 on the hole). Afterwards, one of the guys I played with mentioned to me the actual distance so I kept on bugging him to tell me what the yardage was. It’s like my own personal caddy!
Not too shabby on the course today, blew a couple of birdie putts, 3-putted on 3 holes, couldn’t get out of the sand on hole 8, and ended up shooting a 12 over (41 on a par 29).
The final line: +3, +1, 0, +1, +2, 0, +1, +3, +1
Violated Car
I went to the A’s vs. Yankees game tonight (which the A’s lost 7-2 even though they had Sabbathia on the ropes)! Once the game was over, I bummed a ride back to my car from Gaby and Shin since I had vanpooled to work and then went to the game via Bart.
We pull up to the Park-n-Ride where my car is parked. All of a sudden Gaby notices that there’s something stuck to my car door. I was thinking hmm that’s odd, must be some flyer or something. And as I’m about to reply, Gaby says, “Wait, that looks like underwear.” Course the 3 of us are laughing because really who would hang underwear on a car door – let alone on a car that doesn’t belong to you…
I walk up to my car, and take a closer look. And it is a piece of underwear on my car door! I try to touch as little of it as possible as I fling it off my door handle onto some dirt patch. Of course Gaby and Shin are staring at me while I do this and cracking up. But that is just too traumatizing. My poor car!
Funny Q & A
A coworker just told me that she found the following question and answer on the internet.
Q: My boyfriend tells me to go make him a sandwich and I want a good comeback for this. Any suggestions?
A: Yeah, you better comeback with a ******* sandwich
8 Holes, 4 Balls Lost
Sunnyvale Municipal Golf Course was hungry this afternoon. 4 balls lost to the various water hazards in the first 8 holes. 8 strokes lost. +4, +2, +3, +2, +1, +1, +0, +5. Guess which holes the balls were lost on? The highlight was nailing a plastic post right by one of the ponds… and breaking it… and watching the ball bounce into the water as a result…
I did learn some pretty useful tips from these two guys I was playing with, Herm and Tom – so I guess the 4 lost balls wasn’t a total lost cause. Learn new things every week.