Father O’Leary, an elderly priest, invited Father Diaz, a young priest, over for dinner. During the meal, Father Diaz couldn’t help noticing how attractive the houseboy was.
Reading the young priest’s thoughts, Father O’Leary said: “I know what you must be thinking, but I assure you, my relationship with my houseboy is purely professional.”
About a week later, the houseboy came to the elderly priest and said, “Father O’Leary, ever since Father Diaz came over for dinner, I’ve been unable to find the beautiful silver gravy ladle. You don’t suppose he took it now, do you?”
Father O’Leary said: ” Well, I doubt it, but I’ll write a letter to him, just to be sure.”
So he sat down and wrote: “Dear Father Diaz, I’m not saying that you did take a silver gravy ladle from my house, and I’m not saying you did not take a gravy ladle. But the fact remains that one has been missing ever since you were here for dinner.”
Several days later the elderly priest received a letter from Father Diaz which read:
“Dear Father O’Leary, I’m not saying that you do sleep with your houseboy, and I’m not saying that you do not sleep with your houseboy. But the fact remains that if you were sleeping in your own bed, you would have found the gravy ladle by now.”
Disclosure of Full Service Information
I think for the first time I have just become really pissed at UNCC’s information systems management department. I have had my @uncc.edu email account for over a year now and have been faithfully logging into 49er Express at least once per week. I had never been informed of any way to check that account other than to log in and use the damn web mail console, but now I have run across a document from the college of engineering that states that an IMAP option is availible. I configured it in my client and assumed it wouldn’t function, but it propogated folders and listed all of my mail. Why would UNCC hide this very valueble tool? I can’t believe that this has been hidden from me for over a year.
Trust
Where do I begin with this… I am discovering that I lack the ability to trust. I want to trust certain people in my life so much, but it seems out of my grasp. I have been telling myself that I trust Chris completely, but apparently that is only under certain circumstances. Any time he and I have an argument I worry that I have ruined the friendship completely and I usually become extreamly worried about the situation, even if it isn’t my fault I find ways that it is my fault and I blame myself for the situation. What I have been told over and over is that Chris won’t leave my life abruptly and that there will be chances for resolution, but somehow I don’t trust that. The other there was a slightly hostile issue while he and I were at a store together, and he told me to leave him alone. To get his attention and possibly get him to talk to me I acted like I was leaving without him. He didn’t even attempt to follow me. How did he know I wasn’t serious? I guess he really trusts my judgement and how much I care about him. I could never just walk away from him, ever, under any circumstances! Tonight was an issue of him just wanting some space, but I find myself sitting here, freaking out because he doens’t want to talk to me. My thoughts once again jumped to me asking myself what I did wrong and what I can do to correct it, but should I really be going to those thoughts? In my enlightened and logical thought proccess I know that everything will be ok and Chris will talk to me again later, but my irrational and highly volitle emotional thought proccess is going immediately to being hurt, upset and seeking some type of resolution.
At the momement my emotional state has changed to feeling abandoned because of issues that came up while I was writing a blog entry that was going to be posted in addition to this, I am having these feelings and I need someone to talk to, but at the moment my mother is asleep and Chris isn’t willing to speak to me, so what am I supposed to do? I guess I really do need more friends who are close to me. I hate feeling like this, I need to talk to someone and there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it. I don’t know why some people have to be so selfish Maybe I should just go to bed and try to not think about it? But why would I go to bed this early? This sucks, I think I really need to write in a private journal or something instead of writing this here for you brain-dead fuck-tards who don’t give a shit to read.
Glazing Over
I don’t know that I have ever been as nervous in my time with ceramics as I was on Friday. It was finally time to do some glazing, something which sounds as simple as a trip to Krispy Kreme, but in reality for me was much more strenuous. I think I was more nervous for this firing than my initial firing of the kiln, I guess more was at stake this time. My biggest concern was that something would happen and glaze would end up oozing all over my kiln shelves and into the kiln, or something more drastic, glaze trapping air and something blowing up.
Nothing bad happened during the Cone 06 glaze firing which began at roughly 10PM on Friday, July 1, 2005. The kiln was set for a fast glaze firing, which ramps at about 500° per hour, causing the firing to complete at about 2AM. When the kiln first shut off I began hearing popping sounds from the kiln that were more vibrant than I remember the sound of exploding pottery being described as. I still don’t know what the sound was, but at 3pm this afternoon when the kiln was cool enough to open I was suprised to see that nothing had cracked, dripped, exploded or otherwise caused a problem. My guess is that the sounds were caused by the expansion and contraction of the kiln because of the unusually fast ramp rate.
Anyway, enough babble about my fear of blowing up, I fired 1 terra cotta and 1 stoneware piece with a clear glaze, the other piece in the kiln was a small stoneware piece used for experimenting with color glazes. All pieces came out quite nice. I have taken some pics, but they really don’t show how well the terra cotta piece came out. There are a lot of duplicate images, but they each show something slightly different. Before I put my slightly attentive audience to sleep, here are the pics: http://www.disturbingthoughts.net/gallery/index.php?folder=/Ceramics/20050702/
Enjoy.
A Bit of Humor
Got this joke via email earlier, I thought it was hysterical.
—
When Uncle Charlie died of old age, Bill was bequeathed his uncle’s prized Amazon
parrot. This parrot was fully grown — with a bad attitude and a worse vocabulary.
Every other word was an expletive. Those that weren’t expletives were, to say the
very least, extremely rude.
Bill tried hard to change the bird’s attitude and was constantly saying polite
words, playing soft music — anything he could think of to try and set a good
example…
Nothing worked. Exasperated, he yelled at the bird. But the bird just got louder.
Then he shook the parrot. But the bird just got more angry and more rude.
Finally, in a moment of desperation, Bill put the parrot in the freezer.
For a few moments he heard the bird squawking, kicking, and screaming…
Then, suddenly, all was quiet.
Bill was frightened that he might have hurt his dead uncle’s prized parrot and
quickly opened the freezer door.
The parrot calmly stepped out onto Bill’s extended arm and said: “I am truly sorry
that I might have offended you with my language and action and I humbly ask your
forgiveness. I will now, from this day forth, endeavor to correct my behavior so
that such an ill-perceived outburst never again occurs.”
Bill was completely astonished at the bird’s change in attitude and was about to ask
what had caused such a dramatic change when the parrot continued: “May I ask what
the chicken did?”
How hard is it to search a product catalog?
This is from an Amazon search I was performing while trying to find a replacement clip for my cordless phone. It would appear that A9 is more capable of searching Amazon.com than Amazon.com’s bult-in search utility.
Going Batty
Tonight I was spinning away at the wheel when after completing my 3rd piece I realized something: I don’t have nearly enough bats. Why is it that I have my bats in such short supply? I guess I should find an additional method for temporary storage of wet pieces (or finally give in to what my mind has been telling me all along and go for the 5 pack of square bats). I feel so inadequate because of my limited resources availible for temporarily storing my work, and also the lack of a decent place to let my pieces dry, although I suppose my shelf unit in the basement would be a good place, who knows. Well… as you can probably guess, there are pots to announce, so head on over to http://www.disturbingthoughts.net/gallery/index.php?folder=/Ceramics/20050620/ and check them out.
Now its time for me to go to bed if I actually want to not be dead in the morning, peace out my mud bruthas’. (ok, where the hell did THAT come from? LOL)
Time to Start a Family?
How old do people think I am? Yesterday one of my aunts asked me when I was going to start dating and have a family. What the fuck is wrong with people in my family? Just being over 20 is not a good reason to get someone pregnant and start that type of thing. Also, who the hell is she to actually give advice on starting a family? She just “seperated” from her third husband! I also think its funny that she and others in my family actually assume that I am straight. I have not shown that level of interest in females to actually give anyone the idea that I am straight, nor have I given anyone any indication that I may have interests in males either. Shouldn’t a person’s sex life being personal to that personal and not the business of their entire extended family?
I really don’t think im ready for a family yet, if ever, and I really think that my demented family needs to let me live my life as I wish, not how they would “prefer”.
Death of Hardware
The inevitable finally happened tonight, about 15 minutes ago I managed to kill my Kensington WebRacer touchpad pointing device (kinda like a mouse, but much cooler). Unforunately I can no longer find decent touchpads anywhere, so thus I am doomed to find a replacement that isn’t a touchpad. Up until a few days ago I was still thinking of rejoining the rest of the world with their regular mice, but I am now rethinking that… I just looked on Amazon with a hope in my heart that I would find just one Kensington WebRacer availible, but no luck, however, a very nice subsitute did cross my path. A Kensington Trackball! At this moment I am giving it very real consideration as it is a very nice piece of hardware that meets my reasons for not wanting a “typical” mouse. I am giving the brand itself a lot of consideration because of the duration that the WebRacer had lasted, almost 5 years. The WebRacer’s “dieing issue” is the primary left button, which refuses to click. The redundant nature of the WebRacer eliminates the need for an IMMEDIATE replacement, but it does certainly put pressure on me to prepare to move on, especially since I had the spare left button, it requires my thumb to bend (yes people, I use my thumb to left click and pinky to right click while using the index to move the cursor).
I have been accused of being a packrat when it comes to my hardware, with the way I feel at this moment I understand why I am. While the thought of removing the WebRacer from active duty doesn’t cause me any pain, I can barely stand the thought of throwing it out, it has been with me through so many things over the years, sort of like an old friend.
The end of my computing era with the desktop touchpad is upon me, I shall now move on… or try to at least.
Missing the Floppy
Recently I decided to stop adding more individual card readers to my growing collection wired gadgets, and go for an “all in one” reader. As I sit here looking at this thing in my hand, I realize that while it resembles a floppy in its size and shape, there is a large amount of history that has been lost between the floppy and this device. A floppy disk was a fairly standard method for file exchange/transport. Now that the need for large capacity storage has come about so quickly, it would appear that any hope of ever getting back to anything “standardized” is fading fast. For most uses there is no advantage to using one type of card over another. I can see why CompactFlash is no longer used for digital cameras that much, but there is still a great amount of similarity between all of the medias availible. My old digital camera will write an image in about 5 seconds, this is due to limitations with both the media and the camera, but my new camera will write an image in less time than it takes you to blink, but still slower than the ability of its media, which has theoretical limits of 9 MB/s for reading and 10 MB/s for writing.
With the new device I purchased to consolidate all of my mess into a single form I find only a few disappointments. The first major disappointment is that each media has its own way of being inserted because of the design for handling multiple media types per bay. The next thing that bothers me is that the bays aren’t recessed far enough, because all of my cards stick out really far and this would require me to leave my computer’s case door open when the media is in the bay because of a lack of clearance.
