Walt-O-Matic

So, I’m driving down Waxpool in Ashburn, VA on my way to work, and there’s a truck in front of me with a huge spool of wire on the back.

What’s more curious to me is the way the tools were being transported. Someone had tied a bucket to a rope and put their tools in it hanging off the back of the truck.

This can’t be safe. Well, I guess if there’s no room on the passenger side…

While visiting Ted’s in Sterling, VA, I noticed that their bathroom was either missing a very vital component, or that the place was very accommodating for drunks used to using an alley.

I keep trying to explain there are differences between men and women’s bathrooms. Women have it better. In this case, men just have a wall.

Not retouched.

While hanging out at Potbelly in Ashburn, VA, I found they have a little used book area in the back. I love going through used books, primarily because you find interesting hand written notes.

Here’s one from a dad to his daughter. Not only does the title of the book convey the dad’s impression and confidence, but we also get a peek at his spelling. One fears that it may be possible to piece together a little bit more about this family than we wanted to know.

So, I’m standing in Wendy’s waiting in line. At the cashier in front on me is a mom who has her attention divided between trying to pay and watching her daughter back at the table.

All of the sudden she startles me with a yell, “No Ma’am! I do not want to drink from a straw that’s been up your nose.”

While the mental image was amusing unto itself, I can only guess what other recent activities had escaped her attention in the past.

A while ago, I thought it might be fun to conduct an experiment and rank anything and everything that Amazon showed me. In fact, the rank wasn’t necessarily even important, I just wanted to see what would happen as recommendation after recommendation was ticked off. Would Amazon’s suggestions get better? Would it run out of suggestions? Would it result in an overflow message?

Well, I ranked over 10,000 items over the course of several months, ranging from computer books to perfume. What I found was that in the short term you could get Amazon to run out of things to recommend you. In the longer term, it got a little better recommending things, though the categories get broader, and if you stumble into a new kind of category, it leaps at the chance to have options again to show you. And, finally, nothing spectacular happened numerically when I crossed five digits.

That said, every so often, Amazon makes some amusing recommendations choices. However, this time it was the presentation that was amusing unto itself that I took a snapshot.

Know those split-books you had as a kid, where the page was divided? You’d get half an animal on top, and half an animal on the bottom. Allowing you to make a giraf-o-potamous, an elepha-gator, or a kanga-mander.

Amazon selected two products and presented them split-book fashion. Order, it turned out, was important:

It’s the top of a woman from 2002, and the bottom of another from 2007, put together it looks like one woman standing behind two cut outs on the product recommendation page. I couldn’t help but give each half five stars for creativity.

Was reading on WebMD about the Brain Eating Amoeba:

And it happens fast: Victims usually die seven to 10 days after infection, although symptoms may not appear for up to 14 days.

Initial symptoms include headache, fever, nausea, vomiting, and stiff neck.

I’m trying to picture how a corpse has a fever or complains of a headache.

My visiting niece expresses she wants to go to one of her favorite playgrounds, so we hop in the car and I take a new route so she won’t recognize the place since we’re approaching it differently. I want to see how long it takes before she catches on.

Turns out, I was the one that got the surprise.

I park the car, and we get out and start walking along a black path towards the playground.

“How looooooong to do have to walk?” she asks.

At my height, I can see it. “About a minute.”

“What if it’s two minutes?” she asks.

“What if it’s an hour?” I retort.

“What if it’s two hours?” she counters.

“What if it’s one hundred hours?” I escalate.

“What if it’s two hundred hours?” she throws back.

We’re almost to the playground, so I figure, just for fun I’ll give her a word problem that will bug her all week.

“So, how many days is 200 hours?”

She pauses, looks up at me. “Good question.” She puts her finger on her chin, and immediately answers “Eight days and eight hours?”

I do a double take. “Uh, that sounds about right.”

And at that point she sees the playground, screams “Come on!” and breaks into a full run.

I take a more leisurely pace to cover my thought process. “Let’s see 24 into 20, nope gotta do the whole thing, 24 into 200, wait, 10 is too much, 9? That still feels high. She said 8, let’s go with that, 8 times 24, ok, ok, 8 times 4, that’s 32, okay, carry the 3, 8 times what was it, yes, 2, ok, 14, no 16, dumb Walt, dumb, ok, 16 plus, what was it before, 24, no, 32, wait, carry the 3, 16 plus 3, that’s 19, what was in the last one’s column, 32, ok, 2, alright 192, then I need to what, subtract that from…”

At this point I’m concerned because this little girl just did lightning math in her head without preparation, and I don’t know if she’s going to be able to understand the concept of explaining the thought process that happens in one’s own head. Figuring out how she did this is going to bug me all week.

This weekend, my sister and niece came to visit for the weekend. That meant going to a lot of playgrounds, getting wet in fountains, building things with blocks, and the big treat: going out for steak dinner. I invited my friend Marcus to join us.

During the ride home, I asked Marcus and my sister if either of them had heard any more news about the FAA being accused of hiding controllers’ mistakes by blaming them on pilots. Neither of them had heard anything about it, so I quickly conveyed the details and described by the Washington Post.

Figuring my niece was half-paying attention, I decided to drift the conversation more toward the way of life-lessons. “You know, it’s okay to make mistakes. You just have to take responsibility for them, and offer to help fix them. You’re more likely to be forgiven, than if you hide it — cause that will get you into more trouble.”

My sister chimed in about that being true, helping to reinforce the proper behavior at home.

Marcus added to that, “The people that fly the airplanes should simply follow the golden rule: do unto others as you’d have them do unto you.” I nodded, and he continued, “Don’t lie… Don’t steal…” His inflection indicated he was starting to struggle for some more values to list.

My niece picked up on that, interrupting with “Don’t commit adultery!”

The car went silent. Absolutely silent.

Marcus looked at me, I looked at him, my sister went brilliant red. Did she even know what that word meant?

“I’m not exactly sure how that applies to pilots, but we can run with that,” Marcus recovered quite gracefully.

Unfortunately, I didn’t help. The next words out of my mouth were “Giggity-giggity.” The kid was right.

Yes, it’s true. I was pwned by an 8 year old.

I went to visit my niece this weekend; we were out in the court to try her new Estes Hydrogen Fuel Rocket.

This thing is amazing as it is educational. It splits water into hydrogen and oxygen, and then electronically ignites the gases in an enclosed space, sending a rocket soaring into the air 200 feet or more. No special igniters. No solid fuel cells. In other words: safe, reusable, fun.

Well, right in the middle of the launch sequence, she looks at me and asks, “is that your phone ringing?”

I was pretty sure I had my phone on vibrate, but I pulled it out to double check. “Nope…”

Before I could continue, she said, “It must be mine,” and she pulled out a cell phone from her back pocket, nods that it was her, opens it, and excuses herself to take the call, stepping back toward her driveway.

Meanwhile, the rocket was still bubbling and the launch pad was spewing out verbal facts about Hydrogen.

But I wasn’t paying attention. I was trying to figure out if she had her mom’s cell, but she didn’t. It certainly wasn’t a toy. And at that point, I’m pondering between the wisdom of giving a child a cell phone to call home or be reached, versus the certain insanity that would result come billing cycle if a child didn’t understand cell plans.

She comes back, closing the cell phone and putting it in her pocket, “it was my friend; she was letting me know she’s has a sleep over. Where are we at in the launch?”

I had to pause, we weren’t at the launch phase yet, “Uh, maybe another minute.” I was still thrown off guard that she was that entrusted.

Then I got to thinking, why don’t I have her number? Or why doesn’t she have mine, for that matter.

“What’s you number?” I asked.

“Huh?” She shrugged. “I dunno.”

Ah! Perhaps that what the parents did. They got some special plan where she can receive inbound calls or something. Now I was determined to figure out what it was.

“Do you have my number in your phone?”

She thought for a moment. “No, I don’t think so.”

“You want it?”

“Sure!”

I pull out my cell phone, retrieve my number and show it to her.

“I don’t know how to add it to my address book.”

Fine, what I was really after was her number. I’d get her to call me, caller ID would save the number, and I’d save it.

“Can I get you to call me.”

“Ok.”

She looks at my number, types it in, and holds the phone up to her ear.

My phone’s dead and lifeless.

“Ring ring.” She says, waiting.

I’m still waiting for the call to connect.

“Ring ring.” She’s looking impatient.

Still nothing.

Before I can deduce that perhaps she misdialed the number, she starts giggling. “Why aren’t you answering?”

“My phone isn’t ringing.”

“Yes it is, I’m saying ‘Ring ring’.”

Then it hits me, her parents gave her a dead cell phone to play with. And at this point she realizes I thought she was serious the whole time and bursts into laughter at my foolishness.

“I thought you said you had a cell phone!” I exclaimed, trying to dig myself of out the trap with a logical justification.

“I do,” she said, “my parents gave it to me.” And with that, I realized I’d been set up from the beginning.

She hit the fire button, and the rocket shot upwards with a loud bang, startling me. I had been paying more attention to the phones than the rocket. Clever kid.

Coastal Flats has an enjoyable sense of humor.

I walked up to the hostess desk, and they recognized me immediately. Jokingly, I was asked, “What name shall we put you under as, Walt?”

I attempted to make up a name that would require horrific use of Unicode, if not make it look like a terrorist convention was occurring.

I got a smile as they handed me the pager.

But as I passed by their computer, I noticed they planned to turn the joke at my expense. Here’s how I was paged…. and, boy, did the staffer who seated us look confused.