A. & I have returned from equally hard days at work. Something in one of her experiments has gone amiss and a week’s worth of data collection have been wasted. I’ve had an argument with a superior over whether a particular aspect of the system should be processed “front-end” vs. “back-end”. Meanwhile, the city still […]
In a heart-warming tale of friendship and perseverence, Alan Shepard rescues fellow astronaut Gus Grissom from the throes of heroin addiction just in time for his first trip in the Mercury rocket. Alan bursts through the door of that cheap, Cape Canaveral apartment to find an ashen-skinned Grissom sprawled out in a ratty, overturned chair. […]
We’ve moved to a town that’s three parts Barre to one part Gaithersburg. A. & I have purchased a new-to-you car that has got to be vintage 1970s and may as well require a crew of fifteen to put to sea. The car doesn’t really drive though. It mostly just rolls downhill into our driveway. […]
The plane is the size of a child’s toy but it will transport you across great distances. Just grab it around the fuselage (pinching it is best) just like a child would and mime the take-off routine. Suddenly you will find yourself inside, soaring high above the Earth in Soviet-era luxury. You are the Commandant, […]
A. and I are driving down a road. It’s a dirt road headed through a tangle of trees but it’s also a side-street of this town’s major thoroughfare. We’re headed into the neighborhood where we live. We pull up to a stop sign and I check both ways. In my rearview mirror I see someone […]
We’re assembling bombs from materials we’ve picked up at the grocery store. The plastique and blasting caps and timers and wires and napalm are arranged in barrels like they use for the bulk foods aisle at food co-ops. The plastique is in an array of neon and pastel colors. We mold them into little rabbits […]
I’m attending a seminar on pollution (specifically water & soil; mostly water) at the local St. Mary’s College satellite branch. The seminar is set up a lot like a kid’s science exhibit at some museum; there are transparent, interactive exhibits that we walk to as a group and our instructor (S.?) walks us through the […]
I’m on a webdev team and there’s some kind of 3rd party slideshow app that needs to get plugged into the right-hand sidebar. Their API has a lot of neat hooks — really comprehensive stuff — but it has some of the poorest documentation we’ve ever seen. The launch deadline for the site is fast […]
Cross country road trip and I’m bringing up the rear. Everyone else has already arrived at our destination, a Baltimore-style row house on a Barre-style hill. It isn’t so much that I’m late but I’m the one that got stuck driving solo without a map and without any additional means to contact everyone (unless you […]
The folks “at work” have created an RFID-like device that’s about the size of a flea. It can be sprinkled anywhere on a person’s body to transmit GPS-type coordinates, temperature, pressure and speed, and a bouquet of other data. They’re all excited about it and explain that it’s best installed in someone’s shoe (better for […]