Christmas Eve Eve Eve

I'm blogging from Lansing, Michigan today as we enter the last few days before Christmas. Oddly enough, it's actually warmer here than it was in Southern Maryland. But there is one key difference: snow. There's probably about 5 inches on the ground, and with a little luck it'll still be there when Ramya gets here Sunday night. But that's not the only thing I've noticed that's different. To name a few:

When you go into a store and ask a question about an item, the salesperson can answer your question. This may sound simple to urban residents, but in Lexington Park, the employee will come up to you and ask "Do you have any questions I can answer?" If you ask, say, "Is this TV a full 1080p, or is it just 720p?" They might say "Oh , this is a high-definition set." What's more likely is that they will stare blankly for a second, say "Umm," then start reading the stickers on the TV or reach for a brochure. It's like, why did you ask if I needed help when you clearly can't give it?

Also, when you are one of many people going through a door, the person in front of you holds it for you. I then will say "thank you," and hold the door for the next person, who then says "thank you" to me. Simple, right? In Maryland, you hold open the door for people and they breeze right past without even making eye contact.

Sort of like driving- at the mall, if you're waiting to turn onto the main parking lot thruway, someone will pause and wave you in. It's a miracle! I've gotten used to sitting for up to 5 minutes waiting to get out.

So anyway, I'm almost done with shopping, but I thought I would take a minute to do this year's version of the Christmas "getting to know you" chain e-mail. Why? Because the little "Maryland people are rude" rant was the only other idea I had. So without further ado:

1. Wrapping paper or gift bags? I try to wrap whenever possible, and only use bags for really weird-shaped things, like an ornament that didn't come with a box. Now, my mom loves the gift bags. I'm not talking about the quaint, decorated paper bags with some tissues paper around the gift, I'm saying that she has holiday ziplock plastic bags. She feels the best part is that they're totally reusable- which I can attest to because I think she just has one or two with "To: Marc, From: Mom" written on them that she has used for my gifts the last 3 years. I can appreciate the green nature of the bags, but sliding that little easy zipper over just doesn't have the thrill of tearing wrapping paper. Also, mom eats popcorn and other foodstuffs out of them the rest of the year.

2. Real or Artificial tree? You just can't beat the financial and environmental superiority of the fake tree. And now you can get them pre-lit! And they don't stab you or drop needles like a real tree! Okay, another story: When I worked at the theatre in high school, the Christmas show included 3 massive trees that we had to construct and light every year*- and I mean the side trees were about 15 feet tall, while the middle one was a solid 25. Not only did the lights have to be on there dense as can be, they were lit in color and white lights (which was pretty cool- they'd be white for the classic numbers and color for the fun stuff). So, every year I would spend four hours a day for about two weeks stringing lights on Christmas trees. Then I wold get home and my parents would say "Hey, since you're so good at stringing lights, why don't you do our tree?"

*My senior year we figured out how to store the trees fully assembled, making putting them up a one-day operation. I see this as one of my contributions to younger generations of techies.

3. When do you put up the tree? The day after Thanksgiving, to thoroughly maximize the display time vs. setup time ratio.

4. When do you take the tree down? New Year's day. What else are you going to do while watching football?

5. Do you like Eggnog? I can't stand eggs unless they're cooked enough to be totally hard. If they're a little runny, I cook them some more. Why would I want an egg beverage?

6. Favorite Gift you received as a child? Wow, I think the original Nintendo may still hold the top spot! Closely rivaled by the original Gameboy. Not that these items were better then their successors, but they were such a technological jump at the time. I will say that the Wii (Ramya gave it to me for birthday/Christmas) is steadily climbing the chart. Does anyone notice the theme?

7. Do you have a nativity scene? Nope. Though adding one of those is a lot more likely than me adding a blow-up santa in a helicopter or animated wire-frame deer.

8. Hardest person to buy for? My aunt Karen.

9. Easiest person to buy for? Dad- if I see a gadget or multi-tool or multi-pocketed carrying case and I think "That's cool!" it's a pretty safe bet that Dad will like it too.

10. Worst Christmas gift ever received? I can't think of any that were bad, per se. Although one time an ex-girlfriend's family gave me what they thought was a marble "bathroom set," but was actually a "smoker's set" complete with ashtray and cigarette case. It was clearly used, clearly from a garage sale, and was in a blue velvet presentation box.

11. Christmas Cards...Snail mail or E-mail? Snail mail- although it's a pretty moot point this year, because I'm such a lazy jerk that I did neither.

12. Favorite Christmas Movie? Scrooged is not only my favorite version of A Christmas Carol, it's probably Bill Murray's best work next to Groundhog Day.

13. When do you start shopping for Christmas? Too late, but I'm almost done for this year!

14. Have you ever 'recycled' a Christmas present? One year I got two nearly identical all-purpose tool kits. I gave Carly one for her birthday, but she knew I was re-gifting and I gave her other stuff, too.

15. Favorite thing to eat at Christmas? Christmas Casserole (in which the egg is fully cooked)! Actually, this is probably the first way I ever ate eggs, knowingly or otherwise.

16. Clear lights or colored on the tree? Clear lights outside, colored on the tree. And nowhere will you find the blinking kind!

17. Favorite Christmas Song? To quote myself from last year: "Little Drummer Boy *sniff.* Favorite arrangement would be Mannheim Steamroller's Carol of the Bells, and for a contemporary song I like Mariah Carey's All I want for Christmas is You. Shut up."

18. Travel at Christmas or Stay Home? I can't imagine spending Christmas in Lexington Park. Although now that Mom and Jim also live in Lansing, it's been a lot easier this year!

19. Can you name Santa's Reindeer? I totally just did. Go me!

20. Do you have an Angel or a Star on top of your tree? I have nada. I like the pure simplicity of an undecorated 20-inch fiber optic tree.

21. Open the Presents Christmas Eve or Morning? Always morning. I never heard of opening them Christmas Eve until after childhood.

22. Most annoying thing about this time of the year? Crowds. Hands-down.

23. Shopping...Mall or online? I do as much online as possible, but for some things you just have to dive right into the belly of the beast.

24. Do you decorate outside for Christmas or just inside (or at all)? I like to think it looks tasteful:

25. Favorite Christmas cookie? I think I'll stick with sprits- the little cookies you shoot out of a press and eat by the handfull. Closely followed by cresents.

26. Do you own Christmassy clothing or jewelry? Nope.

27. Do you believe in Santa? I believe in the things he represents. So sort of!

Merry Christmas!

More Shopping

Favorite moment of Christmas shopping today- a guy was standing there on his cell phone trying to determine which version of Nintendogs to buy. Apparently his daughter wanted the Dalmatian version, but they didn't have it. So, he was in a very animated discussion about which one to buy, and he says "Well, they have the Dachshund one." The key here is that he pronounced it "datch-shunned" which I guess is an easy enough mistake to make. But then he went ahead and followed it up with "Screw it, I'll just get her the Chihuahua one" pronouncing it "chi-hoo-ah-hoo-ah." Five full syllables. I'm not saying that we all need to watch the AKC dog show, but come on- these are common words. Have you ever heard of a dog called a chi-hoo-ah-hoo-ah? Maybe you had to be there. It sounded ridiculous.
Also, I just noticed that the cover of the Dalmatian game lists the other dogs you can get, including "German Shepherd Dog." Apparently people were confused and thought you could get a little German human dressed like a shepherd. I'm surprised "Boxer" doesn't get any such clarification.

Chose Your Candidate!

A friend sent me a link to this website: The Presidential Candidate Match Game. It asks you questions about key issues, lets you weigh their relative importance, then spits out the top three candidates that it thinks you should vote for. I think the ability to weigh the questions is key, because when it asks how the federal government should get more people covered by health insurance, I have absolutely no idea.

I am a self-proclaimed politically-ignorant middle of the roader. I think blindly aligning yourself with any party is a poor way to vote. That said, the three minutes I spent with this web app has effectively doubled the amount of time I've spent thinking about the 2008 election. I know, I know, I'm a bad American. Evidently I should be fiercely supporting a candidate by now.

The best part about this link so far is that Ramya took the quiz, and said "I thought I was actually pretty neutral... apparently I'm a full on democrat, through and through." I thought she was joking. If you know her, it's pretty clear that she's a full on democrat. Anyway, try the link.

And this is totally unrelated, but check out this article Jim sent me about Copyright Infringement. I'm with the author- something needs to be done, but the current copy protection technology isn't it. I hate, hate that legally purchased have one-tenth the utility of illegal ones. Until they make the versions you buy better than (instead of way worse) the free version, humanity at larger isn't going to pay for music.

Bluetools

Tonight at the drill hall there was a guy playing basketball with a bluetooth headset on. This astounds me for two reasons: First, what- like he's going to be dribbling down the court, get a call, hit the answer button, and then continue to play while talking? If I was on his team I would be pretty ticked off. But second, if I turn my head too quickly my earpiece goes flying off. Here he was running, dribbling and shooting, with the little blue light blinking the whole time. If anyone else thought this was odd they weren't showing it.

This rivals the other most ridiculous bluetooth headset story I've ever heard: Kate was in an all-day training class, and one of her classmates wore her earpiece the whole day. As though if her phone rang in the middle of class, she would answer it and need to keep her hands free.

I mean, I get annoyed whenever someone is wearing the headset and not on a call. The airport is a major hot zone for this. I wish people would just wear a shirt that says "Look at me! I'm important! I swear!" I also wish I could apply for a public smacking license.

Notes from Philly

Last week my travel-oriented job once again expanded my horizons by sending me to an exotic city I had never visited before. This time I was flung far from home as I took in Philadelphia- the city of brotherly love. Now, I had been to Philly before, but only because that's where the layover is when you fly US Air to Manchester. As I've mentioned previously, I consider this a technicality- You can't count a city when all you do is fly in to the airport, then fly out. This trip counts because not only did I stay in a hotel (that borders the North side of the airport), but I visited Boeing (which borders the West side of the Airport). And actually those are the only things I saw- every day I drove to Boeing, sat in meetings all freakin' day, then drove back to the hotel and went to bed. I saw literally nothing of the city. My physical therapist insisted that I go to Pat's Steaks to get the real Philly experience, but the only (and I mean only) restaurants I ate at were the Boeing cafeteria (which was awesome, by the way) and the Subway by my hotel. I know- it's surprising that I didn't pick up an accent.

The purpose of the trip was for me to take part in a Non-Advocate Review. This means that there's an issue with an aircraft, and they want to bring in a team of people who are technically competent but know nothing about the troubled platform to do a quick review and make suggestions, hoping for something that the regulars have missed. Well, I met at least one of those criteria, so off I went. The first three days were an absolute overload of information that I'll never remember, then one working day, then on the final day we presented our findings. That's right- a full five days of meetings. I've never had to pack 5 dress outfits before. Come to think of it, we have casual Fridays, so I've never even worn 5 work outfits in a row.

The meeting was informative, I like to think I helped, and I'm never volunteering for a non-advocate review again. But I did pick up some observations:

• What the heck is up with people using the word "Incidences?" As in "We have had five incidences of this failure mode." I've noticed it before, but I heard it a lot this week. "Incidences" is not a word! Try incidents! I hate when people take a noun, conjugate it into a verb, and then back into a noun rather than just using the original word. I went on a roughly four-minute tirade about this to Ramya when we were watching MTV True Life, and a girl said that a cross necklace is a "Symbolization" of Christianity.



• Speaking of confusing grammar, one guy commented that he had been working on a long running problem "Since Hell froze over." I wanted to quote Jim from The Office and say "That is not the expression."



• Actually, that guy was pretty annoying. He loved the sound of his own voice. He worked on commercial aviation, and we were there for a military program, which are totally different. At any opportunity he would speak up and say "Hey, in the military world, do you do X, Y, and Z?" To which someone would reply "No, we do A, B, and C." He would then say "Oh, because over in commercial world we do blah blah blah" and talk for several minutes. It was amazing to watch someone establish that what they want to say is irrelevant, then proceed to waste five to ten minutes of everyone's time with a soliloquy that is of absolutely no use to anyone anyway. I think he was personally responsible for the sessions running late.



• Black jeans are alive and well in Philadelphia.



• The Hampton Inn Philadelphia Airport is one of those annoyingly wasteful hotels- by which I mean that every day I would use a nickle-sized dollop of shampoo from the free little bottle, ditto for the conditioner, use the soap, and leave them all in the shower. When I get back in the evening, all the toiletries I used have been discarded and new ones are on the sink. Come on, I used like 5% of the bottle! They're basically throwing away most of the shampoo they buy! There must be a landfill somewhere filled with mostly full bottles of Prell or whatever those generic hotel brand shampoos are.



• The commercial aviation guys did have some fun anecdotes. One of them was about the first time they used composite flooring in the passenger jets. They were plenty strong in all of their tests, but in the field they had a problem because if someone walked over them with severe enough high heels, the concentrated weight on the end could punch a hole in the panel. Apparently this was only observed on the Latin-American airlines. Do with that what you will.

Now this week I'm off to Fort Worth again, and it's possible that I will be on travel the week after as well. This prompted Ramya to say "So you travel, like, all the time." Yes. Yes I do.

Update: It is now 1:43 on Tuesday afternoon, and I'm on a telecon that's a follow-up to last week's NAR. One participant just said "Well, we've seen two incidences of failure mode X." Another (guess who) replied "Well, I don't know what you military guys do, but in the commercial world..." I listened for a little while, then decided to start my stopwatch to see how long he went. Unfortunately (for the purposes of my story) he only talked for another 54 seconds, but still. It's somewhat comforting to know that the old gang hasn't changed much.

Update #2: He started telling another commercial world story before I started typing Update #1, and he's still going.