Leave it to the MTA to be late to start their own walkout. They have never been prompt about anything else...

I just want to know if I'll be going to work in a few hours or not.

MTA people, please just make up you mind. I am very unhappy with you right now. I would bet that even the French have a few hours warning when their city is going to shut down. I can deal with no trains. I have a bike that actually will get me to work faster.

I just want to KNOW.

Sounds like someone is too chicken to strike. Sigh. So close? We'll see I guess.

Posted by Colin J Allen at 12:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Do you ever think about those lost gloves that you see on the street? Or the lonely ones sadly hanging from a fence post? I do. I'm fascinated by them. Will the glove ever find its partner, or is it just waiting for the next sanitary worker to dispose of it? I can tell you from my experience, none of my single gloves ever found their partner again.

What I can't get over though, are the gloves on the fences. Somebody cares with these gloves, to go through the effort to pick up the stray, and to try to hang it prominently and with as much dignity as a glove with no hand can have. Who is this person that picks up the fallen glove? And why? This person is grabbing onto the glimmer of hope that the owner will beat the odds and come back to save his fallen companion.

Anonymous compassion. It always makes me smile.

Posted by Colin J Allen at 4:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ummm. 19°. Well, no question about it, it's cold, but I'll survive, thanks to my many layers of warm goodness. Due to my lack of jacket-mending time, and prescient knowledge of how cold it is and will continue to be, I've adopted a new fashion for the winter. Layers. Cotton on wool on cotton on down on down. Or to put it another way, shirt on sweater on sweatshirt on vest on jacket. It's the best winter get-up I've had in sometime, apart from the whole de-layering problem. It now takes me five to ten minutes just to sit down indoors.

I should just bite the bullet and get myself a pea jacket, but I think that I'm going to wait till after Christmas. That's a good use of holiday funds I'd say. Wonder why they call them pea jackets? Me too. Let's go and see: LINK. Nifty eh?

I really want to tell you about a certain Christmas present I 'resolved' last night, but due to the whole surprise factor, all I can say is that I think that it is the Coolest Present Ever. I just hope that the recipient likes it as much as I do. My collaborator, C_______, agrees with me on this one. If you remind me, maybe I'll talk about it more on the 26th.

Happy holidays to all, and may happiness find you however it does. Specifically, I send my wishes to those good people of Seattle who may find themselves reading this here wee blog. You know who you are.

Posted by Colin J Allen at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There is one easy way to make snow gross and unpleasant. Rain. I wake up this morning and look out my window to see a beautiful, thick layer of whiteness beckoning me to skip out on work and go play in the park. Third snow in a week this is. Unfortunately, my snow fun day was foiled again, this time by rain. Now all the snow is good for is painful snowballs or maybe some really doggy sno-cones.

I'm not worried about missing the prefect snow day. If it keeps snowing at this rate, I'll be sledding down the hill by next week. It's going to be a cold one this winter, according to one of my googling monkeys: LINK. Lots of snow, at least in my hood. Another googling monkey found this great thing for Mac users who tend to obsess the over weather while doing computer things: http://www.weatherpop.com/index.html.

I wish my cubical had windows.

Posted by Colin J Allen at 12:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

test
fnmdsqlaghsadfilghdsf
dfssjklgdshajkald
ffdsshglkjfash;
fbdshjalgh'fsa
dafghdsa'lg

Posted by Colin J Allen at 3:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I sometimes ramble about the craziest things and then have no recollection when someone brings said subject up. This happened to me this Saturday, when I was stuck trying to remember exactly what strange tangent I had rambled off on. My friend C_____ came up to me and said that she thinks of me any time she has soup with beans in it.

Soup? Beans? What the hell was I talking about? How did I manage to get this girl to laugh whenever she sees white beans? Fortunately, C_____ was accommodating to mental white-out and reminded me that the last time I talked to her I started rambling about the underused metaphoric potential of beans as signifiers of race. You got your white beans, your red beans, your black beans and I think they even have yellow beans. Just think, of the potential stereotypical applications, there is so much to work with here, so much that if people actually started using beans as a metaphor to race, the agricultural industrial complex would probably rename all beans to prevent the controversy. I wouldn't put it past them to consider some genetic manipulation of the bean code to produce beans of a less offensive color.

Now that I write this down, I can see why my brain decided that this idea was not worth long-term storage. However, I may just smile the next time I have some split pea soup.

Posted by Colin J Allen at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

The other night I was amusing a friend of mine, and a thought occurred to me. Do dart players embrace the idea of a perfect dart game? Imagine that you were so good at darts that you start with three bull-eyes, then move on down to a triple twenty, triple nineteen and a triple eighteen, and so on and so forth till you have run the entire board. Then, just to rub it in, you hit triple twenties while your opponent struggles to keep up.

Let us go see what the wiki' has to say: LINK

Turns out that there is a lot I don't know about darts. But for those of you who want don't want to click that link, to play the perfect game in darts you can do the following:
* treble 20 (60), treble 19 (57) and double 12 (24)
* treble 18 (54), treble 17 (51) and double 18 (36)
* treble 20 (60), treble 15 (45) and double 18 (36)

If you don't think that is hard, then you have never played darts.

I think that I'm going to stick with air hockey and bocce.

Posted by Colin J Allen at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)