The other night at 9:00pm, a pair of Mormons show up on my doorstep. I had difficulty arguing the lateness since I was in the middle of playing Lego Batman with my daughter, though I managed to slip out of any lengthy conversation by stating that I was about to get the kids to bed (something I legitimately should have been doing). A part of me secretly imagined what might ensue if a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses had happened upon my porch at the same time. The following morning during my commute, I imagined myself playing devil’s advocate with them regarding their faith. But really, who am I to throw stones – they are entitled to their beliefs. Though I’d like to think that I’m equally entitled to my privacy. If they return, it will likely be to square off with my better half – after which they won’t be back. 🙂
Category: The World
Friday 5: Auto Motivation
Having been a driver for 18 years and having driven numerous cars in that timeframe, there are some things that I’ve learned over the years. Here are a few of them:
- A part that costs less than $30 will give out when you least suspect it and gladly cause another $1000 in damage when it does.
- While individual drivers may be intelligent, a group of cars driving together is only as smart as its weakest link.
- Never underestimate any driver’s ability or likelihood to do something unexpected or stupid (including when you are a passenger).
- Nobody likes getting pulled over and most people don’t likely shift their habits much or for long due to being stopped. That aside, if you get stopped, be polite and respectful. If you want to fight it, fight the system, not the cop – the former often works, the latter almost always doesn’t.
- Don’t assume, no matter how competent the mechanic, that small details won’t get overlooked (e.g., forgetting to tighten the drain plug for the transmission, forgetting to tighten the lug nuts after hand tightening). Check their work – especially if it is your work.
Bonus: If you are driving down a 25 degree include on a country road at over 60mph and come upon someone going slower than you’d prefer – especially if you are towing a camper with a sofa tied to it – don’t try to tap the guy’s bumper to get him to let you past. Conversely, if you are the slow guy in front, get the hell out of the way.
Blurbsday: Diction
Maybe it is my age (nearly 34 – getting up there, I know). Perhaps it is my ethnic background (I happen to be of the ruling minority – white males). Maybe I’m a bit stuffy or stuck up (I try to be a tolerant individual), but no matter what, “Where you at?” will never be a phrase that I can picture leaving my mouth. It is simply the epitome of improper grammar. You don’t need to be an English scholar to find the faults, but it lacks any form of verb and ends with a preposition (last I checked those are big no-nos of basic sentence structure).
So when I got asked the previosuly noted question by a co-worker over the phone, the only thing the kept me from hanging my head and sighing was the fact that I was attempting to park my car at the time. Upon pointing out the fault and answering the implied question, snickering from my passenger elicitsa follow-up of “Who you with?”
Day by day I make progress. Meanwhile my 5-year-old daughter is fluidly integrating words like apparently, conveniently, and recently into her vocabulary. So I have some points of solace.
Irony
It is often said that this word is misused (which is often correct). We will use ‘ironic’ in speech all the time in reference to incidences of coincidence or oddity or as an incorrect substitute for sarcastic. I say we because I’m certainly guilty of it myself. I try to be conscious of it and avoid it when i can, but in speech it can pass as such with most simply due to the ubiquity of its misuse.
Merriam Webster lists the following as one of the definitions of irony: “incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result”. In other words, if you take action specifically to foster a certain result and the opposite result occurs, you have just been a victim of irony. This was a fairly common theme in much of Shakespearian tragedy and is often referred to as tragic irony.
Today I have come to realize that I have made myself a victim of tragic irony. You see, I had long been reluctant to conform to the masses by being drawn into social networking. I initially set up this blog because, well, I had the domain and figured it could serve as a digital journal. I hope that some enjoy reading it, but traffic has never really been a strong goal. But recently I’ve decided to try to make more efforts to grow an audience.
As some of you may know, I am now a Facebook member and in an effort to drive traffic to my blog, I’ve connected my blog feed into it. And oddly, as I’ve been getting more feedback on my writing there, I’ve watched my analytics plummet. As it turns out, the feed stream does not get tracked as a hit on my site, and having full access to the posts in Facebook, no one is coming to my site to read them.
So the very efforts I’ve enacted in order to increase traffic to my site, has resulting in a huge drop in said traffic. While I’m glad that my writing is being well received, I am already making steps alter things. From now on, I will post links to these posts manually on Facebook – thus only including a blurb and forcing people to read the full content here. I hope you forgive any inconvenience this may cause – such a move feels like I’m trying to assert control over my work as if it were some sort of intellectual property (well, I guess it kind of is, but it isn’t like I’m making money off of it regardless – I just like positive graphs). If this move seems to drive even more of you away from my writing, that would indeed be yet another twist of irony (I think).
At a Loss
I’ve lost it. All of it. Well … most of it … and hopefully only temporarily. Specifically what I lost was data – lots of it: hundreds of digital photos, thousands of MP3s, countless documents, spreadsheets, graphic design projects, videos, etc. All gone without so much as a hiccup of noise to announce their departure. You see, they were all saved on an external USB hard drive – a 1Tb drive that I treated myself to last fall – that suddenly decided to cease to function.
The loss is inexplicable and immeasurable. The drive had been working fine no more than a couple days ago. But when my wife attempted to fire it up today to access it, it seemed disinclined to come to life. The power light would come one and blink a bit. Her laptop would attempt to connect to it. But in the end, the drive didn’t seem to want to perform. I, being the manly man of technology that I am, attempted to use my own laptop and a number of different USB cables to troubleshoot the issue, but to no avail. It is kaput.
The good news: (a) it seems the device is still under warranty and (b) there are services available who may be able to recover the lost data. So hopefully at some point in the near future I will have a shiny new external hard drive that works and all of my files conveniently found and restored (unfortunately not without incurring some costs, but little in life comes for free). And beyond that I hope that I can manage to get to a point where such a loss is less likely (e.g., having my files in more than one place to avoid such catastrophic results). But in the meantime, I’m floating in the limbo of not knowing if, when, or at what cost I will have my data recovered (or whether one of the costs of recovery is a void to the warranty). And such a lack of knowledge leaves me at a loss for comfort, security, or resolve.