No, real ones. For now, it’s just medical records. But just wait for it… and attendant “issues”… such as,
[Patient who’s lost 40 pounds, creating a new “wrinkle” for the technology to parse] “Oh, dear, you died last week!” *heh*
Did You Ever Wonder…
What the “real world” would look like through “3-D glasses”?
“Whoa, dude, 4-D!”
*heh*
It’s a Problem…
How do “bottomless cups of coffee” work, anyway? I mean, if they’re bottomless, how could they be cups, and how could they hold coffee?
Somebody wasn’t thinking when they made that one up.
So, I Got An Email The Other Day About How to Stop Procrastinating
Haven’t gotten around to reading it yet. Maybe tomorrow.
Super What?
I had a guy call me this afternoon with a problem installing a printer on an Ubuntu box. Somewhere in the midst of it all he asked me what I would be doing for the Super Bowl.
Him don’t know me vewy well, do he? *heh*
I asked him when it was going to be. He said 5:30. I then asked what day. He said today.
*heh* Who’d-a think it?
Super Bowl? I DGARA.
If I wanted to watch football, I’d look for one of these games:
Yet Another Cavil, Gripe, Grumble, Complaint
Full Curmudgeon Mode, I suppose… *sigh*
Something I’ve noticed more and more recently–and even worse, found myself unconsciously influenced by!–is a growing occurrence of sentence fragments used in the place of complete sentences. It doesn’t seem to matter what the genre is, either. I’ve seen it (of course *arrgghh!*) in the simperings, whinings and blatherings of the Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind, in academic writing and in fiction. The use of sentence fragments that are nothing more than prepositional phrases in place of complete sentences is especially pernicious.
I suppose some may be excusable in casual writing as some sort of contemporary method of adding emphasis to a preceding sentence. Maybe. But it’s seeming to become pervasive, invasive and influential as it corrupts clear, concise writing.
It’s irritating, especially when coming from the pens of otherwise capable, competent, effective writers. Are they simply trying to write for the ADD/ADHD crowd, those whose attention spans can’t grasp the use of commas, conjunctions, semi-colons and other means of joining independent clauses, and who even stumble over the simple addition of a prepositional phrase modifying or expanding upon an independent clause?
Thankfully, my writing style does drive off those whose grasp of English falls within the parameters of “Me, Tarzan. You, Jane” or “See Dick. See Jane. See Dick run. See Jane run.” I really don’t want or need anyone reading my screeds who’s too lazy, inattentive or stupid to understand sentences longer than three or four words…
Oh, well. It’s not as though I gave a rat’s patootie; it just chaps my gizzard a wee tad.
/rant off
Wisdom of the Ages
From Forward the Mage by by Eric Flint, Richard Roach and Jim Baen: How to deal with enemies:
Whenever you can, stab ’em in the back.
Better yet, stab ’em in the back in the dead of night.
Best of all, stab ’em in the back in the dead of night while they’re asleep.
If you’ve got to stab ’em in the front, try a low blow.
If none of that works, then use all your skills as best you can, you stupid dummy.
Git ‘er done.
*heh*
We R Rural
Pretty much, here in America’s Third World County, yep: rural, all right. Purdue University has applied an “Index of Relative Rurality” to stats from American counties that illustrates the point pretty well.
A recently introduced, continuous, multidimensional measure of rurality, the Index of Relative Rurality (IRR), avoids the confusing effects of inclusion in metro boundaries. (2) It does not answer the question “Is a county rural or urban?” but instead addresses the question “What is a county’s degree of rurality?”
The IRR is based on four dimensions of rurality: population, population density, extent of urbanized area and distance to the nearest metro area. These dimensions are unquestioned in terms of their contribution to rurality and are incorporated implicitly in many existing rurality definitions. The index is scaled from 0 to 1, with 0 representing the most urban place and 1 representing the most rural place
(CLEEK to Embeegan, as TWC’s–relatively–vast alien invasion population might say *sigh*)
See that color code next to the bottom? That’s us. We’re not completely devoid of human habitation, and we do have access to–sort of–“urban” areas, but da “piney woods” is our “back yard” (and for many their front yard too), and there are parts of the county where YOU DO NOT GO even if you aren’t a terminally stupid “revenooer”.
A good place for a “bug out location”. Just sayin’.
Oh, you’ll notice I gave no further indication of which of those counties color-coded with the next-to-most-rural coding is America’s Third World County. Long time readers of this blog can pick it out right away, anyway.
Amazingly Talented
I have an amazing lip-reading ability. For example, I do watch Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind “news” programs every now and then, but I mute the sound when I do. That way, when, say, The Zero is featured in a clip, I can amaze others present with my lip-reading ability. For example, in the clip the following graphic was extracted from…
“Lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie.”
See? Amazing.
(BTW, I also have the ability to read minds. I know this because I got absolutely nothin’ from Biden.)
Not Quite That Ambitious
I saw an article on building a Linux-controlled “Corretto” coffee roaster and thought, “Cool, but where would I put everything in our kitchen? I’d have to build on an addition!”
*heh*
Still, one of the things that gives Henry Ward Beecher a claim to historical immortality that rival’s his sister’s is his appreciation of good coffee:
“A cup of coffee – real coffee – home-browned, home ground, home made, that comes to you dark as a hazel-eye, but changes to a golden bronze as you temper it with cream that never cheated, but was real cream from its birth, thick, tenderly yellow, perfectly sweet, neither lumpy nor frothing on the Java: such a cup of coffee is a match for twenty blue devils and will exorcise them all.” – Henry Ward Beecher
And, after reading the above paean to a good cuppa joe and singing a few verses of O Blessed Holy Caffeine Tree i9n appreciation of The Holy Brew (#1) myself, almost the article cited above persuadeth me to do a “Linux Coffee Roaster” build of my own… Almost. I’d still need to build that addition onto the house.