You hear that, Mr Andersen?

200!

To celebrate my 200th post, let's have a bit of culture -- how about a Greek poem?

Water Drinkers

I don't dread the Pleiades setting
when I'm out at sea, nor sea storms
pummeling the back-braced keel, nor
lightning striking off a bowsprit

nearly so much as I've come to dread
the man who sits and sips his water
so that he can better remind us later
exactly what each and everyone said.

  — Antipater of Thessalonica

I wonder how the rise of designated drivers has changed how parties work? After all, they're socially mandated water-drinkers...

As an aside -- according to Poetry Daily, this poem plays off the proverb "I hate a lively sidekick with a good memory," and the morning setting of the Pleiades marked the end of the sailing season and the beginning of stormy weather. So now you know. :)

***

One downside to having an album called Disco Fever on your headphones while working is that it can be very difficult to explain to your co-workers why they saw you, in a moment of abstraction, doing the hand-movements for "YMCA". Luckily, I'm in a corner, so people have to actively look at me to notice what I'm doing. Even so, I'm attempting to keep my grooving to "Boogie Nights" to an acceptable level. ;)

Speaking of work, I was here until well after 4am Wednesday morning -- I'd gone out at 6pm to hang out with Jenni and her crew (where we playtested her Mean Girls game), and I returned to work around 10pm. The main reason it took so long was that I couldn't start rolling out most of the changes until the coordinators finished dealing with the night's film-outs at around 1:20am. Also -- you know the sense of dismay when it's around 3am, and you realise that one of the things that you've assumed will just work, just won't, so you have to roll back a whole brace of changes? Yeah.

I saw my new flatmate this morning; it's the first time since the weekend, when she moved in. Weird.

On the upside, I did work out a way to work around a retarded FileMaker 6 restriction -- after much frustration and pulling of hair, I discovered that FileMaker's text-match only looks at the first 20 characters of any word (and only the first 60 characters of the field). Since many of the things that I was trying to examine for duplicates are longer than 20 characters, this was a problem. I'm not particularlly proud of the solution I found (arbitrarily splitting the text every 20 characters), but at least it gives the Editorial department the information they need; and we'll probably be throwing this stuff away at the end of Kong anyway, assuming I finish off the new version.

(I really hope I finish the new version... in the next few weeks. Yikes.)

The other upside was that I got to sleep in until 10am. Well, that's kinda an upside...

***

When they decided to provide rose and sandalwood pump soap in the bathrooms, I resigned myself to having hands that smelled like turkish delight every time I went to the loo -- but they crossed the line when they started to put vanilla air-freshener in the toilets. An outhouse smell is unpleasant, sure, but replacing it with a bakehouse smell is somehow peversely wrong. Bring back the faux flower fragrances, say I -- down this road leads Fresh Baked Bread air-freshner, and then it's just a small step to Garlic Mushroom. Or worse yet, chip flavours -- Sour Cream & Chives or Spicy BBQ aerosols, anyone? Stop the madness now!

***

I feel I should say something insightful or profound on the event of my 200th entry -- preferably something that could potentially achieve the immortality of ending up in someone's .sig file -- but I'm afraid I'm coming up blank. For my 100th post, I was able to talk about finally buying a house, but there's no change of similar magnitude on the horizon; my life seems to be happily chugging away, and while it's not perfect, I'm pretty happy with the way it is. Thanks to all of you who take the time to read this stuff. :)

Posted by svend at November 3, 2005 10:14 AM