Wednesday, December 6, 2006

Roundup of the past three days

In approximately the past three days I've noticed 6 seeming synchronicities that I can remember:
  1. Two ZIP (file compression) inconveniences
    • Coworker Adam was showing me how to attach documents to tech support tickets. He zipped a Word document before attaching it, mentioning that company policy requires such compression. Later, I was practicing creating a ticket. When I was attaching a word document, I forgot to zip it first and he reminded me.
    • That night, at home, on the laptop, I was looking at the collection of books and articles by authors like William S. Burroughs, Alfred Korzybski, and Timothy Leary at http://www.greylodge.org/occultreview/idxs/completeidx.html. After peeking at a few of the documents in PDF format, I became slightly frustrated because there were a few more that I would have liked to peruse, but they happened to be posted as zipped PDF files, and I didn't have time to download a program to unzip them with, because Jaye was only in the kitchen for a few minutes and would reoccupy the computer when she returned to the living room.
  2. Two things involving an obscure usage of the word "buffalo"
    • I put Nyx in the carseat while she was asleep. When she was strapped in, she opened her eyes slightly, and I imagined her saying something like "Ah, I see you have managed to buffalo me once again, taking advantage of my incapacitated state to place me in captivity." Except that I couldn't actually remember the word "buffalo" -- I struggled to identify the word I wanted, to fill in that blank in my fantasy dialogue.
    • Later that day, I was sitting with Nyx (still strapped into her carseat) in the back seat of the car in a Target parking lot, listening to Garrison Keillor's show "Prarie Home Companion" on the radio. He sang a song about the city Buffalo, including a line about the deceive/hoodwink meaning of "buffalo".
  3. Two mentions of a child being bitten by another child in daycare
    • Jaye was looking at a post, on a message board that she frequents, in which a mother posted pictures of her child who had been bitten and scratched by another child at daycare. Jaye conjectured something to the effect that she would freak out if this happened to Nyx.
    • Either that day or the next, we were watching a French movie in which a mother abandons her child in her apartment and the child dies of thirst. Before that happens, the mother picks her child up from daycare and, in her conversation with the daycare worker, there is some sort of mention of a child being bitten at the facility.
  4. Two appearances of Morocco/"Morocco" on the same coworker's computer, both involving backgrounds
    • As I was sitting with Adam, learning some tech support ropes, I was thinking about asking about his desktop background -- a photo of a man standing in a rocky mountainous terrain. He soon pointed it out himself, identifying himself as the man in the picture. Turns out he was in Morocco for a mission trip. [His desktop background seems to change many times a day; I'm guessing he has some program running that automatically changes it periodically.]
    • Later that afternoon, Adam complained about the background color/font color combination of the chat program he was using, saying he found the text difficult to read with that combination. He brought up the list of available color schemes for the background in the preferences for the chat program. One of the 13 schemes was called "Morocco".
  5. Two similar variations of "supporting someone in the manner to which they are accustomed" in rented videos
    • We rented the 1970 movie "Love Story", in which the character Jennifer says to Oliver: "Get out there and support me in the manner to which I'll be accustomed" according to this transcript.
    • Two days later we were watching the TV series "Lost", which we had also rented from Hastings. In episode 14, Susan tells Michael (approximately): "You can support Walt and me in the manner to which we'll soon become accustomed." [Future tense variations of the phrase in both cases.]
  6. Two instances of praise for bulleted lists
    • On Monday, I was performing the last of my assigned tasks designed to get me familiar with the software that the company creates and markets. Since the software works with Microsoft Powerpoint, one of the tasks involved creating a Powerpoint presentation with three slides. It didn't really matter what text I inserted into the slides -- I was just replacing "Click to add title" and "Click to add text" with random text, to make three slides, each with a title and two or three bullet points. So the titles and bullet text of my three slides ended up looking like:
      • Bla sodding bla
        • Click to add lex luthor
        • Fantabulous!
      • Snap delaroo
        • Let's put some text here
        • Because it's there
      • Aren't
        • Bulleted
        • Lists
        • Heavenly?
    • Either later that day or the next day, Adam was showing me how he adds notes to the tech support tickets, and he emphasized how much he likes using bulleted lists within those notes.

Wednesday, November 29, 2006

two apocalypses within five seconds

At 5:00pm today, I was looking at Mark Pesce's del.icio.us page (http://del.icio.us/mpesce), having followed the link to it from his professional blog (http://blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/). I was looking at the list of tags in the right-hand column of http://del.icio.us/mpesce. My attention focused on "apocalypse", I put my mouse pointer over that link, I was trying to summon into consciousness the word "eschaton" because I was going to check out that link too. After about 5 seconds of trying to remember the word "eschaton", the guy in the cubicle facing mine walked in from outside and said:
"it's upon us, man. the horsemen are rolling", referring to the cold front and large clouds quickly rolling into town after a fairly warm morning and afternoon.

  • I hadn't really put very much effort into remembering the word "eschaton" (a word which crosses my mind so often that it probably wouldn't have taken me very long to recall it if I had really tried) but I was reminded of it when I followed the "apocalypse" link, because Mark Pesce had tagged the same page with both "apocalypse" and "eschaton".
  • In another Firefox tab I was looking at the Wikipedia entry on del.icio.us (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Del.icio.us), having gotten interested in the folksonomic structure of del.icio.us as I read about it in Mark Pesce's blog.
  • Yesterday I was looking at the website for a PBS Frontline episode called "Apocalypse!" (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/apocalypse/).