At work they are experimenting with some kind of noise-making device.  I noticed it today when I was leaving the building to go home for lunch.  When I was walking through the first floor on my way out, I heard what sounded like a very low-flying airplane.  Turns out it’s some kind of noise generator, for “voice security.”  I don’t know how this is supposed to help people in their jobs.  The idea is that it makes it so that other people talking loud won’t bother you as much.  The thing is, if you’re a person that talks loud on the phone, you’re still going to be bothering people.  And what someone really needs to invent is a means of disabling ring tones on cell phones when they enter a certain ‘zone.’  I would appreciate that device.

Also, I wonder if they are familiar with the use of white noise in sensory deprivation.  Various militaries have used white noise, combined with dark hoods, stress positions, and sleep deprivation, to interrogate (some might argue the proper word is “torture”) prisoners.

Speaking of White Noise, that movie was terrible.

The static’s where you’ll find me

This may be weird, but I enjoy walking in the rain.  In college I only carried an umbrella for a short time during freshman year before realizing it was kind of a hassle.  After that I just never used one.

If I were in a rock band I’d wanna do one of those cliche videos where we’re playing in heavy rain and it’s in slow motion and everyone’s jumping around and the water is flying from people’s heads and guitars, and did I mention it’s in slow motion so that it looks totally awesome.  I’m trying to think of a video like that but can’t remember one off the top of my head.  “Thief” by Our Lady Peace has a video where it’s raining, but not for the purpose of being cool so much as to symbolize sadness.  I think there was a Live video (Dolphin’s Cry maybe?) where they were playing in rain (I think?).  Oh I think I just remembered which one I was thinking of- the “Perfect” video from A Simple Plan, where they’re playing on the roof in the rain.  I just think that’s really cool looking.

Anyway it’s something I’ve thought about during the last two days’ nearly-constant downpours, so I thought I’d blogify it.

Rain falls on everyone, the same old rain

Tuesday evening, Kip and I drove back to Newton to pick up the newest addition to the Robinson Family.  We are happy to welcome Miss Punky “Pants” Robinson, a 6-month-old wire haired terrier mix, to our loving family.  I would like to tell those of you out there, that she and I are very good buddies right now, but it did not start out as such a good relationship.  The first night Punky spent with Kip and me, she didn’t want to go to bed when it was time.  We crated her for the night, and for those of you that don’t have dogs, that means that we put her in her crate and closed the gate on her so that she couldn’t get out.  Well she didn’t like that, and after about twenty minutes of whining and scratching from the crate, we decided to see if she would be ok with just being penned up in the kitchen.  We learned all too quickly that she could jump or climb over any kind of blockade we could create to keep her in the kitchen.  We had to put her back in her crate in hopes that she would eventually calm down and go to sleep.  By 12:30 am she had finally calmed down some, but I couldn’t sleep.  I stayed up playing solitaire and reading in the room.  I finally thought that I might be able to go to sleep around 1:30 am, but as soon as my head hit the pillow and I rolled over, she was whining again.  It didn’t last long, but it kept me from sleeping for the next two hours.  To top it off, Kip started talking loudly in his sleep, so loudly in fact that I was afraid he would wake Punky up and she would start barking and whining again.  Anyway, after that first night, we realized that Punky needs to be in a more closed off place to sleep at night.  Wednesday night we tried out keeping her crate in the pantry room, and we didn’t hear her at all.  Since then, everything has been going quite smoothly.

This weekend we are spending in Newton for a family reunion.  It was quite exciting when Punky first arrived at Kip’s parents’ house.  The last time we had a puppy here, August chased Ted and Grace around the house.  They were both terrified of her.  This time around, Punky is big enough to take on Grace.  But Ted keeps growling and barking at her.  Grace and Punky are still trying to get to know one another, and their playing scares me a little.  I’m always worried one of them is going to get hurt.  But I’m told that is how they get to know one another.

Pictures of Punky will be coming soon.  Keep an eye on Kip’s posts for when they are online.

As Stephanie said in her post yesterday, we got a new puppy named Punky.  We got her last Tuesday, and now I’ve got several pictures of her up.

She’s very cute, but for the first couple of days I wasn’t sure how well it would work out.  She just made us both think about how much we missed August, and it seemed a little too soon.  But then we grew to love her very quickly. :)

A word about her name- we didn’t pick it, but it’s what she already answered to so we kept it..  And to the Havens, if you are reading this, I don’t mean that to put down your choice of name.. it’s just not what we would have picked. :)  And we also give our dogs middle names or nick names, following the tradition of my parents who have Grace “Goose” and “Big Head” Ted.  August was August Louise Robinson (I’m not sure why, it just kinda seemed to fit), and now Punky is Punky Pants for some reason.

Anyway, you can see the new pictures here.

I just added a text-only feature to my site.  If you’ll notice at the very bottom of each page is a “View text only” link.  That might be useful if you are on dial-up.  And the setting is stored in a cookie so you don’t have to keep clicking it.  And, if you are browsing from a PDA, my site will default to text only, which is nice for people who, like me, browse the web from a PDA from time to time and don’t like how this page doesn’t fit neatly into a 240x320 screen.

I realize that my last post was about our new puppy, but she does all these cute and/or annoying things that I feel I must share with the rest of you.

Punky, we believe, must have been a descendent of some cat-dog union.  She seems to love climbing up onto the back of our couch, and going to sleep on the skinny ledge that it creates.  She also loves to play with my yarn that I sometimes leave out after I’ve finished knitting for a moment.  I came into the living room the other day to find an entire skane of purple yarn strewn all over the floor.  I then had to rewind the entire thing (I had barely started using it on a project I have had to put on hold).  Last night I started another project with the very same yarn.  This morning when Kip came into the living room, he found punky with my project and the ball of yarn on the floor.  Her doggy tendencies resurfaced in that my wooden knitting needle had been chewed on the end so that I can no longer use it.  Kip had to rewind the yarn and I had to buy new needles today.  She also likes to claw at things, like cardboard boxes.

Despite all the annoying things she does to destruct all the nice things I have around the apartment, I still love her very much, and I’m so thankful to have her in my life.  She is so cute when she curls up in my lap or beside me on the couch to take a nap.  She is so much fun to play fetch with.  I love my puppy!!!

I get very peeved with people who pass on the right.  Especially if there are two empty lanes to the left of me.  When people do this I always try to box them in if I get the chance.  If there is anyone in the right lane traveling slowly ahead of me, I’ll try to catch up with them before the person can cut me off, and then I’ll do everything I can to maintain the same speed as the slow car.  This way the jerk who was way too busy to pass on the left like he is supposed to, is forced to slow down and pull behind me.  You know on the autobahn you can travel 125 mph, but if you pass on the right, or don’t get over to let a faster car pass you, you can get a ticket.  I think the Germans are on to something...

So Kip informed you of one of his pet peeves when it comes to driving.  I thought I would add one of my own.  I can’t stand it when people get over into the turn lane way too early.  If there are multiple right turns, and the right lane is only for right turns, you should use it as a passing lane to get to your right turn, which is two turns away, ahead of everyone else.  It is dangerous for those people trying to turn onto the road that you are traveling on becuase they don’t know if you are going to turn or not.  And for those of us traveling along side of you, you tend to make it impossible for us to get into the turn lane when we need to an appropriate distance from the turn that we need to make.  If someone gets over way to early and I can get the chance, I pull over in front of them and slow way down just to keep them away from their turn that much longer.  As you can tell, Kip and I can get some pretty entertaining road rage.

In the interest of giving my loyal fans some new blogopodian content, I’d like to state, for the record, that The Colbert Report is awesome.  I would have posted this two weeks ago, but I wanted to give it a little time to see if the rest of the show would be as awesome as the first two episodes.  Well they have decreased in quality just a little bit, but they’re still really funny.  The level of arrogance is one I’ve only seen matched by Maddox.  The other night he had a segment where he said Rosa Parks was overrated.  That’s the kind of statement that you’d expect from Maddox.  Now I’ll make a little prediction about the show:  I think that eventually he’ll get rid of the “I’m going to walk to the guests instead of the other way around” thing.  Sure, it was really funny at first, but it will get old.  It’s like South Park killing Kenny each episode.  After a while it stopped being funny, and they wisely removed it from the show.  But I digress, and I need to be coding right now.

Other broadcasters read the news to you.  I promise to feel the news at you.

I mentioned a while ago that I browse the web with my PDA sometimes.  Well when you search Google from a PDA, it has this nice PDA gateway thing that will translate pages to a form that can be viewed on a PDA easily.  From my experience it works very well.  I made a page to be my PDA’s homepage, where you can enter a URL and have Google make it look right on your PDA for you.  I figured I’d share it with the world.  I also put links to all the sites I visit frequently from the PDA (yep, that’s all of them), so you can get a peek at my browsing habits if you’re curious. :)

Other links:  these two links go to vi cheat sheets.  If you’re not a programmer you probably have no idea what vi is.  If you are, you may still not know. :)  Anyway, if you are familiar with vi--but can’t remember things like “k == up”--you might want to print out one or both of these cheat sheets and hang them near your monitor.

vi cheat sheet 1 (PNG file)
vi cheat sheet 2 (WARNING:  PDF file... in case you hate them as much as I do)