For the last couple of months, I have been getting a couple of people a day signing up on my community bulletin board using Russian-sounding names and usually gmail addresses that don’t match their usernames. Since the community served is a town nowhere close to Russia, these have to be some kind of spammers. Even though new users have to type in text from an image (Captcha), they can’t actually post any messages until they are confirmed by me. And I won’t confirm them until they tell me their real name and where they live. For a while, I would send an e-mail when someone signed up asking for this information, but after getting some obviously bogus signups, I just put in the instructions that people needed to e-mail me if they wanted to be authorized to post messages. None of the Russians has done that.
Month: February 2011
Nouns to Verbs
On one of the flashlight discussion boards I visit, a guy said he was going to buy some particular flashlight and gift it to a friend of his. Somebody corrected him and said that he should just say he was going to “give” it to his friend. Well, this is a global discussion and not everyone even writes English that well in the first place, so I didn’t see much reason to post a correction, but whatever. It started a discussion about proper English and how people are abusing the language, often by turning nouns into verbs like in this example (though “give” doesn’t always imply a “gift”). Then somebody else, referencing the forum’s ability to post a multiple choice poll, said:
Maybe we should open a new poll: Is it okay to verb nouns?
Wonder Mop
Due to some recent incidents at my house involving a puppy, I needed to mop up the tile floor in the back room. I have had a few different mops over the years. For a while I had a sponge-on-a-stick that came with a plastic thing you would press down over the sponge to wring it dry. This always looks like it works great in commercials, but it seems like they are always cleaning floors that are already clean in the commercials. I have another one that has an arm that runs some rollers over the sponge, but that thing never worked well either and I think the sponge has since deteriorated. I also have a traditional mop with threads and that’s what I use when I need to mop (usually I just sweep). But it’s kind of hard to wring out a mop like that, partly because the head of the mop is pretty big and I can’t get my hands around it to twist it. Then there is the whole philosophy of mopping. It seems like first you want to slap on a bunch of soapy water, then kind of scrub with the mop and wring out the dirty you pick up. But once the water is dirty (won’t take long), you are just smearing around dirty soapy water. So it seems like there should be a bucket with fresh soapy water and you kind of lather up the whole floor, then you start scrubbing and wringing. Finally you might need to do it all over again with some plain water to pick up all the soapy water.
New Satellite Receiver
I switched from DirecTV to Dish Network so long ago that I couldn’t even blog about it (April 2002, though I found an excuse to blog about it in December 2003, after the blog had started). I bought the receiver which included a massive 40GB hard drive to record 40 hours of programming so that I could watch shows whenever I wanted. And best of all it included a 30-second skip button that I could use to zap commercials. I skipped so many commercials that I wore that button out on my remote.
Puppy in the House
On the Avondale bulletin board a woman was looking for a home for a stray black lab puppy she had picked up in December. She has taken great care of the dog, taking it to the vet, getting him fixed, microchipped, and boarding him because she can’t keep a dog in her apartment. I offered to foster care for him while she looks for a home because I know boarding isn’t cheap, and I just don’t like the idea of any dog being boarded for so long, especially that young.
She brought him over yesterday. He is incredibly skinny, but he has a ridiculous appetite so I know he will pick up weight. I can’t even feed my two dogs with him around because he just dives right into their food. They don’t know if they are allowed to put him in his place, so they just let him do it. He hops right up onto the sofa and stays right beside me, loves to fetch and likes to chew on a nylabone, or really chew on anything he can get to. One of the first things he did was stick his head in a waste basket with junk mail in it and had 3 or 4 pieces of unopened mail in his month, walking away like it was some kind of prize or like he should go deliver it. It was pretty funny.
Katie and Austin are tolerating him, but Austin is kind of freaked out and doesn’t even like staying in the same room with him. That’s terrible because Austin likes being next to me so much but this dog (his rescuer has named him Moses) just wedges in like other dogs aren’t even there.
I’ll post some pictures this weekend. He looks pretty much identical to Austin except smaller and skinnier.
I only worked 6 hours today, but that still meant I was away for over 8 hours and he didn’t have any accidents or destroy anything (well, one dog toy was disemboweled).
He is estimated to be eight months old and is smaller than Austin or Katie and much thinner than either one. He probably only weighs 30 pounds, if that.