How's Your Day? - November 2013

There was a time when I claimed to avoid mirrors for fear they'd attack me in self-defense.

 

A steamy shower helps a lot.

 

Any aspiring android developers in the house? I have an idea for a (what I think is) simple app.

 

aspiring? perhaps....
know what I'm doing yet....HA! (/Alf)

 

I have changed my mind and now support justifiable homicide. Our accountant was too lazy to give me correct specs on an payment card gateway upgrade, so I wasted 12 hours and countless conference calls getting it to work, and now it all has to be changed. Other than that, now I and one other person have to take hours more to reconcile the CC info. I will end up wasting close to 40 hours of work because she couldn't be bothered to take 30 seconds to give me 1 key piece of information. It would have taken me 30 minutes to finish. The worst part is that she never apologized and would not take a single bit of responsibility. Because of that, it was all documented and sent up the line.

 

^

 

November in general has not been a great month for me. Work has been busy with training and hectic with upgrades and performance issues.

 

Ugh.

Your bosses don't happen to be responsible for handling healthcare.gov do they? (Sorry guys, I promise, no politics, just trying to be topically amusing by referencing a hopefully universally recognized fowl-up)

Seriously though, there's nothing worse than taking the fall for other people's incompetence. Hopefully, your track record will show through, and the higher-ups will recognize the symptoms of the greater problem. Hang in there guy.

 

Did something cool today. Took the first steps toward making my own bullet microphone. Stripped a cheap giveaway desktop alarm clock of it's piezo, only to find that it's one of those awesome little flat contact piezos. Wired it up and tested it out by holding it to the bottom of a pill bottle and talking into it, and it doesn't sound half bad at all. I think with a little tweaking, and a decent housing, I could make a fairly decent mic for playing around with. If nothing else, i'll have something to use for those rare occasions when I want to jam out with the harmonica.

What I really want to find, though, is an old telephone. I want to take the speaker out of it and use that as the microphone. Those things have a great vintage sound.

edit: after further refinement, and a more permanent construction was made, I plugged it into the PA system to see how it sounds.

Ever heard the phrase "North end of a South-bound mule" ? It actually does make a pretty neat effect, but it's nowhere near speaking quality. I do think it serves as an excellent proof of concept, though. I'm looking forward to playing around more with this.

 

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Micah knows! <sinister laugh>

 

[/quote]
perzactly

 

Nope, my website works far better than that one. Just rolled out a new one about a month ago when the disk array on the hosts server died.

Thank you. First thing I did was document the whole mess and sent it to the top 3 people at our company. All is fine for me, besides the mountain of work I have to get done.

 

Huh... who knew Easton, PA had culture? (I went to school in Scranton. Yeah, not much culture there either.)

 

The PEZ museum closed a couple years ago, but Easton seems to be on the upswing. Not a bad little town.

I had a house mate from Scranton when I went to University. I swear there is something in the water up there... I ended up covering him with towels and stapling him to the floor one night when he passed out with C&C Music Factory Everybody Dance Now on repeat. Good guy, but yeah something in the water up there.

 

Excessive coal dust was my theory. That and a touch of the hillbilly gene. But, I was never able to prove that. But, all-in-all, the locals were nice. Tho, a few definitely hated the college kids in a love-hate kinda way.

Great prank tho!

 

I figured it was all of the mashed bananas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty-Thousand_Pounds_of_Bananas