DIY Planner - Things Not To Buy For Christmas - Comments

Fair enough

steves — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 10:41:59 -0500

Hey, it worked when the aliens invaded in Independance Day:P

I read somewhere a while back that they had a contest between a WWII morse code operator and a 13 year old girl on a cell phone, to see who could send a message faster. Morse code guy one, but it was sort of pointless because he had to make the recipient pinky swear not to tell anybody:P

Steve Sharam
www.whenrealityknocks.com

My girlfriend

steves — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 10:39:32 -0500

works at a huge bookstore and someone recently asked her, after holding onto her for 20 min., when the store was overwhelmed because of a celebrity book signing, to move all the books on all the shelves in the whole store so that she could see them better.

She just walked away too:)

Steve Sharam
www.whenrealityknocks.com

Goodness!

steves — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 10:33:06 -0500

Wow, I guess I got off easy, no ones ever pulled a knife on me at work:P

Steve Sharam
www.whenrealityknocks.com

nope

HistoricStitcher — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 09:57:16 -0500

no more than the student who threw a cigarette butt into the paper recycle bin in the commons.

that one destroyed part of a dormitory.

in the middle of the night, no less.

That is downright criminal

ygor — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 09:34:13 -0500

Did she ever "get a clue" about the level of stupidity she demonstrated ?
I hope it took her a long time to clean it up.
-----------------------------------
"I think the surest sign that there is intelligent life out there in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us." (Calvin and Hobbes/Bill Waterson)

Sad, but what can one do ?

ygor — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 09:30:55 -0500

All you can hope is that folks remember it well enough NOT to copy it.
-----------------------------------
"I think the surest sign that there is intelligent life out there in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us." (Calvin and Hobbes/Bill Waterson)

My favorite

HistoricStitcher — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 08:27:32 -0500

is still the art student who wanted to use deer bones in her project and decided the best way to clean and dry them was to put them in a firing kiln - then leave for 8 hours.

I walked into the building for normal rounds and the smoke filled the building so low I had to duck to find the source, and found the student coming in the back door to check on her project. She didn't leave when told to, and opened the smoking kiln before I could get there - making flames 8 feet high from the previously-only-smoldering mess.

I actually took lung damage from that one.

And she had the nerve the next day, coming into the office to get let in to clean up the mess, to tell me that I should have let it burn down, then she wouldn't have had to clean it up!

Last winter one of the med

Tournevis — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 07:37:09 -0500

Last winter one of the med students at my institution decided that he was too broke to use the climbing gym in town and decided to scale the computer science building instead... without ropes.

He fell, of course, and promptly splattered onto a delivery truck.

I really feel bad that he died, so can anyone say "Darwin Awards" for me please?

Yep. You know from whence I

DegenerateLyre — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 22:34:18 -0500

Yep. You know from whence I speak. We've got three college campuses here (four if you count the medical school separately), and the sheer number of stupid things college kids can get up to is enough to boggle the mind.

I think we've admitted that

DegenerateLyre — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 22:32:39 -0500

I think we've admitted that woman for a psych eval! I used to be surprised at all of the insane demands people will make, and then the lengths that they will go to in assuring the rest of civilization that their weird, totally irrational ideas make perfect sense.

"Find my keys", indeed. I think not.

No doubt. Some of the best

DegenerateLyre — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 22:30:22 -0500

No doubt. Some of the best calls come from shops at holiday-time. Usually for trauma because people actually fight over things. Someone at a local so-upscale-I-can't-even-afford-to-drive-past-the-place shop called us for assistance because three customers got into a fight over the last handbag in a specific style and pattern. One had two black eyes and a missing tooth, one had scratches all over her face, and a chunk of hair missing. The third was unscathed. When we asked how the third managed to make it out alive, she just smiled and said "I pulled a knife."

Thanks. I'll try to hang in there. *grin*

Oh, that will go over well...

DegenerateLyre — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 22:24:43 -0500

I want to be a fly on the wall for that phone call. Being from Virginia and listening to all the brou-ha-ha about the 400th Anniversary was amusement enough, but listening to people get their facts wrong about it is even better. Thankfully, we have helpful and good archaeologists who *do* have the correct information. *laughs*

You just have to wonder sometimes...

I'd love that nice straight key!

Anonymous — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 21:51:11 -0500

As a licensed Amateur Radio operator we use morse code all the time, when everything else fails and conditions are at their worst, CW (carrier wave) which is what Morse code uses, is about the ONLY thing that can facilitate long distance communications.

Give me a car battery, my transceiver, 100ft of wire and I can communicate pretty much to anyone in the world. During most natural disasters It's ham's who the word out first.....thats why we're treated as a public service and allocated so much RF spectrum.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ham_radio

I've seen plenty, thank you

HistoricStitcher — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 17:13:13 -0500

I was a first responder on my college campus for four years. There's very little done by stupid, drunk college students that I haven't seen, fixed, reported, or extinguished.

Not yet

HistoricStitcher — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 17:11:32 -0500

But I plan to post a few pictures of the towels on my blog when I finish them. I still have eto cut the second batch off the loom, wash them, and hem all of them. Then the photo shoot.

I found my loom incredibly cheap through the Spinners and Weavers Housecleaning webpage. I'm it's third owner, but only second user. I've spent more on planner stuff this year than I did on that loom! But it does take up space in my living room...

Things Not To Buy For Christmas

steves — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 19:59:09 -0500

Hi all, Steve here again, after a short absence. I've been busy selling Christmas retail you see and Christmas retail has the affect of destroying your brain. I tried to write a column last week, but all I managed to do was drool on the keyboard, which seemed unsatisfactory subject matter to base a column on. But now I'm done with retail for the time being and I'm back to write a column: About retail!

Bet you didn't see that coming. Or maybe you did. But still, it's a subject worth talking about. Many people are busy these days, running around doing last minute Christmas shopping…but I discovered something during my time in retail: Most of what they sell is garbage. And I'm here to tell you what not to buy for Christmas with: Steve's List Of What Not To Buy For Christmas!

O.k., if you didn't see that one coming, I give up on the lot of you, I swear. These days corporations are turning out enormous numbers of useless products, as well as products that would be useful, except that they don't work, and products that serve no conceivable purpose whatsoever, either actual or potential, real or imagined…except that they are cheap. This is true; I've seen it in action. People will buy almost anything, as long as they can justify the purchase to themselves as a bargain. It's a bargain on something that doesn't work and would be stupid even if it did and most sensible people wouldn't plunk down hard-earned currency on the table for something like that…until you tell them that they can get an extended warranty for a very reasonable price. For something they don’t want. And that doesn't work. And is stupid. This really actually happens, all the time. When the item in question either breaks or refuses to function at all, people will march in, criticize the product, it's designers, the store that sold it to them and your personal genetic heritage. And then demand another one. If you can't deny that you spent hard-earned dollars on something stupid and useless, at least you can console yourself by taking advantage of the reasonably priced extended 3-year warranty plan.

I would like to announce, just by the way, that after working yet another year of Christmas retail, I now no longer feel that the human race has any redeeming qualities at all. Thank you.

Some products start off as useful items, but over time become so ridiculously overbuilt that they become essentially useless. A good example is cell phones. In the beginning, people talked to each other, mostly about nothing. Then came pagers, which let you know that someone wanted to talk to you, mostly about nothing. Then came call phones, which allowed people to talk about nothing anywhere. That's about all the nothing anybody needs. With cell phones, we've really reached the Beam Me Up Scotty stage and we don't need anything else. And the companies know that, so they've started tacking on more stuff, stuff most people don't want and won't use, but all for a very reasonable price. The newest generation of cell phones lets you take pictures, have a video conversation, play MP3s, listen to satellite radio, surf the web, watch Youtube, use instant messengers, check your email and, with an optional telegraph attachment, send Morse code. If you still have any time left, you can talk to people, though anybody who's busy uploading pictures of their friends throwing up in them in a bar to Facebook probably doesn't have time to talk to anybody. What an age we live in.

Still, cell phones can be useful. Some products are just completely hopeless and should be avoided at all costs. So, as a public service, I have compiled a list of products that you should avoid. Some of the following items are real and I compiled them simply by walking around the electronics store where I worked and some are made up: Try to guess which ones are real; I think you'll be pleasantly horrified:

Combination nose hair trimmer and MP3 player
Vacation property accessible only by attack helicopter
Rubik's cube
T.V. remote control with optional car charger
A DVD series, Bagels Of The World: A Tasty Travel Documentary
A light for the brim of your hat
Combination pencil sharpener and heart rate monitor
A fiber-optic blinking Christmas tree that plugs into your USB port
Combination acoustic guitar and GPS
A clock that projects the time in a fuzzy blur onto the ceiling

I'll give you a hint: The projection clock is a real item. Now, I'm not saying it's totally worthless, but if I had a choice between the projection clock and a slice of pizza and a kick in the head, well, it's hard to go wrong with pizza.

So I hope that helps with your last-minute Christmas shopping. If, on the off chance you're wondering what any of this has to do with productivity and why I wrote a post about it for this website, let me assure you that this website post comes with a very reasonably priced extended warranty plan.

Until next time, keep your pen on the page and nose hair trimmed.

Steve Sharam
www.whenrealityknocks.com

D*I*Y Planner - Things Not To Buy For Christmas - Comments

Fair enough

My girlfriend

Goodness!

nope

That is downright criminal

Sad, but what can one do ?

My favorite

Last winter one of the med

Yep. You know from whence I

I think we've admitted that

No doubt. Some of the best

Oh, *that* will go over well...

I'd love that nice straight key!

I've seen plenty, thank you

Not yet

Things Not To Buy For Christmas

DIY Planner - Things Not To Buy For Christmas - Comments

Oh, that will go over well...