Archive for the 'Geek' Category

One phrase I constantly hear in the office that drives me absolutely nuts is “super excited.” I think this is a Microsoft-ism (and I feel like it started within the last year and a half or so), although Microsoft isn’t alone in its “super excited” disease (see Steve Jobs, students at Isaac Middle School, some random OJ Simpson fan, and 352,000 others out on the Internets).

It turns out I’m not the only one at Microsoft whose ears hurt when she hears this, but I think that my reasons are different from Dare’s. Dare complains that it sounds like an exaggeration, that everyone at work who is “super excited” about x or y technology or new project can’t actually be sincere. I cringe when I hear this phrase because the speaker sounds unintelligent when he utters it. And the reason he sounds unintelligent is because it’s just plain bad grammar.

If you remember back to elementary school, you probably recall that adjectives modify nouns, and adverbs modify adjectives and verbs. “Excited” is an adjective – it modifies a noun (the noun, in this case, being an effusive and grammatically-challenged public speaker or email author). “Super” is an adjective. In fact, even its status as an adjective is tenuous (the OED classifies super as a noun first and a verb second, and it acknowledges a colloquial adjective form). While some online dictionaries will acknowledge that another common colloquial usage of the word is as an adverb (meaning “very” or “extremely”), the OED makes no mention of this bastardized form.

Bottom line? Don’t say “super excited.” It’s synonymous with “stupid.”

Kenny got me a fantastic early birthday present: a Nikon D40 digital SLR. It arrived yesterday, and I’m eagerly awaiting the weekend when I’ll have more time to play with it (and actually start learning how to use it).

Of course there are very few gifts that we can give each other these days that are completely unselfish, and I fully expect that he’ll enjoy this one almost as much as I will. :) In fact I may try to get Kenny the 18-200mm lens for his birthday…

• I’ve been having another bout of insomnia but I’m at Remedy right now testing out their Deep Sleep tea. The owner of Remedy claims that she won’t drive after drinking it.
• There’s a new Seattle Transit blog, for all the geeks who want to follow the plans for the new light rail system and other developments. As a friend of mine put it, it seems that every transportation project in Seattle causes “the largest controversy Seattle has seen since the last big transportation controversy” (see The Viaduct Debacle and The Monorail Debacle for just two such recent examples). Personally I can’t wait for light rail and am very excited every time I drive by SeaTac and get to check out the progress on the rail line down there (and the signs that say “Light rail to the airport in 2009.” We’ll see when they really finish, but it’s exciting stuff nonetheless). 
• Kenny and I are closing in on the finish of our Thai Tom NCAA bracket. The final round may turn out to be a sleeper since Swimming Rama and Panang Curry will duke it out in the semi-finals. My officemate suggested that we may want to reseed, but I think we’ll just keep it as is and see what happens. Hopefully the current schedule won’t hurt our Nielsen ratings. :)
• Nine (yes nine) years after purchasing it, I finally played Grim Fandango from beginning to end (I guess I can thank the aforementioned insomnia for that one). It was great, don’t know why it took me so long. There are a few big leaps (nothing too much worse than using the banana with the metronome in MI2), but overall it was an enjoyable game with an engaging story and a particularly unique style – certainly the first Aztec/Day of the Dead/Art Deco/film noir video game I’ve ever played. It’s too bad the adventure game genre is dead…

I think the tea is starting to do its thing. Maybe I’ll get to sleep at a reasonable hour tonight…

I’ve been trying to decide how to host my photos, since I haven’t been 100% satisfied with Gallery 2. I was initially opposed to using Flickr because I wanted my photos to be well integrated into my site, but I started playing with it a couple nights ago. And of course it turns out there’s a whole slew of WordPress plugins for Flickr, including fAlbum, which I’ve been testing out a little and so far it seems awesome.

Flickr even has most of the features I’ve wanted in a photo-hosting solution, and it seems they have a great feedback loop/quick release cycle to boot. I was just complaining to Kenny yesterday that I couldn’t organize my photo sets into uber-sets (albums and sub-albums, in Gallery terminology), and today they released the feature (they call the uber-albums “Collections”). Sweet.

Now I just need them to give me the flexibility to choose which photo in my set is the “highlight,” as I used to be able to do in Gallery, instead of automatically using the most recent photo as the highlight.

I’ll unveil my Flickr page in a few days, when I’m finished uploading my thousands of pictures. If you really want to see it beforehand, it shouldn’t be too hard to find.

We found these neat “Vintage Edition” board games that are packaged to look like leatherbound books, and contain wooden pieces and cards with old-fashioned typefaces (it turns out they are manufactured exclusively for Target, but I can’t actually find a link to the product on their website). We purchased Risk and Monopoly.

Monopoly is a long and boring game, so we bought that one pretty much for looks. But when Kenny discovered that I had never played Risk before, he decided to teach me the game.

We’ve played three times now, and I’m wondering: is it just me, or is Risk a really stupid game with only two players? It seems that the game is decided by the end of the second round, if not earlier. At that point, someone has Australia or North America or both, and it’s pretty much over. And actually, in the three games I’ve played, there seems to be a very simple rule in play: he who goes first wins.

Yes, I’ve only played three games, so I’m sure there are many exceptions to these generalities. And supposedly it’s a much more interesting game with >2 players, so I’ll wait to try that before dismissing it altogether.