The tree in the lobby of my workplace is no longer rotating at 1 rpm. It has been unplugged and now just sits there like a normal Christmas tree, probably because they are about to take it down.

As an Illini fan, watching the Rose Bowl was brutal.

Pointless random rotating tree updates mixed with equally pointless and random sports comments: It do what it do.

Spam is one of the scourges of the Internet. (How’s that for the most obvious statement of the year?) There was a time not long ago, before I eliminated one of my constantly-spammed e-mail addresses, that I was getting upwards of 250 spam messages a day. I’m sure that number is low by some people’s standards, but it was absurd by mine. (Read more…)

In the reception area of my workplace, there’s a Christmas tree. It is in one of those rotating stands. It sits there, all day and all night, slowly rotating at approximately 1 rpm. (Read more…)

Here you go. Proof that anything and everything is available for sale. I don’t know how many of these will be sold, but one figures that if they are putting in the time to build and market it, they expect that someone will buy it. (Read more…)

A couple months ago on a Friday or Saturday night when I didn’t have to work the next day, I was wired, so I decided to go out for a late-night walk. And by late-night, I mean really late — as in early; it was 3 or 4 in the morning. I was probably so wired because of all the Diet Black Cherry Vanilla Coke (not caffeine-free) I had been drinking. (Read more…)

For those wondering where my blog has been, here’s a break from the silence. I was on vacation last week. In addition to driving about 1,100 miles, I finally got seriously cracking on a certain project that includes the word “Generation.” (Read more…)

I remember how, when I first started paying attention to the Internet my freshman year of college — way back a long time ago in 1994 — the Usenet newsgroups where I first started posting my Trek reviews were filled with threads devoted to “versus” scenarios between various aspects of sci-fi. (Read more…)

This is surely not new to a lot of people (I first saw it probably a year or so ago), but I still have to post it nonetheless, because it’s an example of something that made me laugh for all the wrong reasons. Perhaps one of those reasons is having empathy for someone drowning in a very public way. Or perhaps it’s cruelly laughing because, hey, it’s not me drowning, it’s you. (Read more…)

I don’t know what this means, but I thought I’d dash off a few sentences about it. At work, I sit by a window that’s next to a fairly busy intersection. Every few days for the past few weeks, this semi-truck drives by the building through the intersection. Except, for some reason, he always sounds his horn — very briefly, maybe a quarter of a second — as he approaches. (Read more…)

The original headline for this was “Time Waster #1″ because I expected “Time Wasters” would become a series on this blog, but that was jumping the gun and also would cut down on the potential for original headlines, so I’m going to nix that idea.

Anyway, my sister Jill sent me this YouTube clip I found amusing. (Read more…)