Sophie just discovered Enchanted, the 2007 Amy Adams movie in which a cartoon character is transported to the real world.
Her thoughts when she saw the animated princess transformed into an actress?
Mommy, you put your movie inside my movie! Now it’s a Sophie movie and a Mommy movie!
You got animation on my live action! You got live action on my animation!
I made a typo while doing some paired programming with a colleague, writing “border: 1px” where I actually meant “border: none;” I joked:
Me: (indignantly) I know the difference between one and none!
Colleague: That’s good… since that’s what binary is…
The man’s got a point…
A colleague just returned to work today after the birth of his son. He described the process of learning what different cries mean:
It’s like learning a new language while sleep deprived and while the person teaching it to you is yelling at you.
Overheard in the office:
About-to-Retire Staff Member: Are they serving alcohol?
Conversation at work today:
Colleague: I have stories to tell about Cleveland!
Me: Does it rock?
Colleague: It does not.
That about covers it.
I don’t often take cabs in Boston, but I did tonight, and en route the driver told me this story, which completely stunned me:
People used to run out of cabs without paying all the time. After ATMs showed up, that hasn’t really happened anymore. So, I have to believe all those people weren’t really dishonest; they just didn’t have the money.
Amazing! Easy access to cash solved an apparently unrelated problem of people shirking their cab payments. This is a Freakonomics moment, for sure.
He speculated further that many of the former shirkers had spent their money at bars, perhaps inadvertently, leaving them with no way home but to risk angering a cab driver.
Of course, the next logical question is how the newly mandated credit card machines in cabs will change the equation. This driver had three concerns. First, the processor takes a 6% cut. Second, it takes weeks to get the money (which is problematic when the driver has to pay cash for the cab and cash for gas). Third, people often leave before the payment clears, sometimes leaving the driver empty-handed.
This bothers me. Whereas market forces can correct the strictly financial problems — by changing rates, or forcing cab companies to negotiate more flexible terms with drivers — the social implications of a technology causing people to unintentionally abandon their debts are less easily remedied.
A sixth grader reflects on what went right and what went wrong in his recent project:
My project went horribly wrong. My mom did it for me and I got caught.
An e-mail update from missionaries living in Africa:
Some of the neighbors died of malaria, and our refrigerator broke!
I heard this angry exchange between two women as I got on the T:
First Woman: I work hard for a living! I work (expletive) hard to make money! Don’t you get that?
Second Woman: Look, all I’m saying is: I don’t know anybody named John.
I can’t imagine how these two could possibly have been having the same argument. It reminds me of a Louis C K routine about arguing:
I decided that I’m gonna argue with this guy, but I’m gonna argue about something else. I’m not having his argument; I’m having mine. So, he’s like, “Go!” And I go, “Well give me back my jacket!” And he stopped. I was like, “Yeah, you got my jacket! Give it back! I said you could borrow it, not have it!”
(And now, as a result of this post, Google has “comedian stole my jacket” in my permanent search history.)
This is an actual support ticket our help desk received this morning:
I can see and hear everyone in the class. They can hear me. They can not see me.
Wow! Philosophy classes have gotten a lot more intense this year!
(In fairness, this seems to pertain to video in an online class, but absent any formal acknowledgment of that in the ticket, I choose to believe this professor is a ghost.)