johnrobe

Whenever I do home improvement projects, I always emerge feeling manly and satisfied. Unless they don’t work. After one of those, I emerge feeling sweaty, inferior and seriously questioning what my fate will be in my frequently-imagined post-apocalyptic future.

This last weekend my project was finally installing the motion-sensitive light fixture that my brother gave me on the back of the house. I figured this wouldn’t be too hard, if everything was up to code in terms of junction box etc., with the light that was there now.

My house has some quirks with its electrical system as we’ve discovered. The previous owner was quite a capable handyman, but his profession was paint and drywall, not electrical, and sometimes the things he did … well, let’s just say they worked, but few were able to figure out how exactly. I hate to make a joke that sounds like a culturally insensitive Polish joke, but the light switches in my house are backwards – up is off, down is on, and apparently that’s the way it’s done in Poland, where the previous owner was from. I tried to rewire it myself, but 20 minutes and several visions of toiling in Lord Humungus’ sugar mines later, I let them be and decided I could learn to love the Polish way.

When I took the old light fixture off the wall, I was very happy and relieved to discover that there was a standard, up-to-code junction box underneath. I happily rewired things, installed the mounting plate, and then spent 90 minutes trying to fit the light onto the mounting plate.

I don’t know wtf was going on with that mounting device, but the one of the screws just wasn’t long enough to mount the damned light fixture properly. I was able to mount it, but there was a gap of about a centimeter on the one side because of the too-short screw. Making it worse was the issue that once I had wired the light fixture into the junction box, I couldn’t just set it down to figure out what to do, I had to mount it or unwire it. Net result was that I had to hold the thing up there with one hand while I worked on my tiptoes with the other hand.

I was frustrated, perspiring, and ready to throw in the towel and contemplate a world with no light in the backyard, when Timmi came down with a great idea – why not use the Mighty Putty we got for Christmas and see if that helped. At first, I thought her idea was crazy, but honestly, I was supposed to use putty or caulk to seal it after the fact anyway, so I thought, what the heck?

Very long story short, fast forward a half hour later, and that light fixture was securely affixed to the wall and nicely sealed to boot!

Now all I need to do is work up the courage to leave the light on without me standing there with a fire extinguisher. We’ll deal with that bit of paranoia in another post.

John General, Rants, Shameless Consumerism

According to the New York Times, 95% of blogs are abandoned. Anyone still checking here probably feels like this blog is one of them, but not so.

I have a lot to write about, but I’ve been having a bit of a hard time lately.

I promise to you all these topics, as soon as I’m able to bring myself to write again:

• My review of Star Trek. I owe it to you after all the foreshadowing.
• My response to Mike’s tagging of me about 5 or 6 months ago
• A post about Rock 4 the Kids, something I am so very proud of, but haven’t spoken about here.

All this and more… soon. As soon as I can actually think and type and write again.

John General, Music, Rants, Television

Is there anyone … ANYONE who looks at this trailer:

… and doesn’t think that it’s the worst movie ever made?

All I can think is …. this is what they put together to make people want to go … it’s a highlight reel of the best and funniest moments. Whatever they DIDN’T put in there must have been some sort of anti-humour, perhaps some of the most powerful in the universe.

John Movies, Rants

Originally uploaded by puuikibeach

I live with a wonderful woman who goes into a freaky rage at the sight of an apostrophe in the wrong place. I admit that I react with emotions ranging from amusement to mild anger whenever I see a grocer’s apostrophe myself, but my reaction is nothing like Timmi’s.

So it’s a good thing we’ve never been to the Grand Canyon!

Two people were just convicted and sentenced for correcting the grammar on two signs in the Grand Canyon National Park. They were sentenced to a year’s probation and banned from US National Parks for a year. I suppose it’s not a huge sentence, but it’s still injustice, if you ask me.

Photo credits as noted. Found in the the (awesome) Atrocious Apostrophe’s Flickr group.

And now … the same post, apostrophe-gone-mad style!

I live with a wonderful woman who goe’s into a freaky rage at the sight of an apostrophe in the wrong place. I admit that I react with emotions’ ranging from amusement to mild anger whenever I see a grocers’ apostrophe myself, but my reaction is nothing like Timmis.

So its a good thing weve never been to the Grand Canyon!

Two people were just convicted and sentenced for correcting the grammar on two sign’s in the Grand Canyon National Park. They were sentenced to a years’ probation and banned from US National Park’s for a year. I suppose its’ not a huge sentence, but its still injustice, if you ask me.

Photo credit’s as noted. Found in the the (awesome) Atrocious’ Apostrophes’ Flickr group.

John Photo Snarkiness, Politics, Rants

A while ago, I had a weird incident at a shawarma place where they just couldn’t understand why I didn’t want tomatoes on my sandwich. I had chalked it up to the oddity of the particular person helping me at the time and let it go.

Then today, new restaurant, same order (chicken shawarma), same issue! I asked for everything except tomato, and instead of a “Sure thing sir!” (or even just a nod), I received:

Him: What? Why don’t you want tomatoes boss?
Me: No thanks, I don’t like tomatoes.
Him: Really? You don’t like tomatoes?
Me: Nope. (I wasn’t going to go into the whole “I do like them, but not raw when they’re over a certain size” thing, having learned in the past that it warps people’s brains)
Him: Who doesn’t like tomatoes?? They’re good for you!!
Random woman standing next to me: I’ll have his tomatoes!
Me: She can have my tomatoes.
Him: He needs to eat tomatoes.

Fortunately, at this point he seemed to accept that I didn’t want them and constructed the sandwich without the tomato. He did not give my tomatoes to the woman next to me, much to her disappointment.

John Food, Rants

Dear Harmonix, makers of Rock Band Wii,

I love your game. I don’t like that my Guitar Hero guitar doesn’t work with it (and your corporate speak explanation about how it’s all Activision’s fault comes across about as sincere as a telemarketer’s apology for interrupting your dinner) and I don’t like that I had to wait longer than everyone else to get Rock Band for my gaming platform of choice, but you are forgiven, because the game is so good.

Or at least, you are almost forgiven, because there is still one really annoying problem. See the movie above. That blinking light is what I see in my living room every day and every night. That blinking light represents the optimistic USB guitar dongle seeking the Wii wireless guitar in vain. The only way to stop it blinking is to unplug the dongle from the USB hub. You put an on/off switch on the guitar — why can’t you put on on the dongle? Heck, why not just make it so I have to push a button on the dongle every time I want to sync a guitar to it? I really wouldn’t be upset. This isn’t a function that is so critical that I’ll be upset if the dongle doesn’t instantly find every guitar that comes within 20 feet. If I play Rock Band once a day, do you know how often I need to use the wireless sync functionality? Once a day! Yet you have this thing seeking guitars 24 hours a day, endlessly blinking and blinking and blinking.

To top it all off - it doesn’t even sync very well! You would think that the benefit of all this vigilance would be that when I did want to play a little guitar that as soon as I turned the guitar on and came anywhere near the dongle - zap! It would be ready to go. Unfortunately, its actual track record is something like one time in five that it actually manages to notice the guitar at all. I have to stand next to the Wii, turning the guitar on and off, on and off, on and off, until the bastardly blinking light eventually goes solid to tell me that the dongle has deigned to notice my guitar. A coworker didn’t know about the “turn the guitar on and off” trick, so he used to reboot his Wii every time! This is what you’re making people do. Stop it! Stop the madness!

You can make it up to me with Rock Band 2.

John Rants

John Music, Rants

Dear makers of the predictive text engine on my new phone, the HTC Touch,

"Whatnot" is a word.

It is not a very commonly-used word, I admit. It is one of those words that my Mom uses frequently, like bric-a-brac, flim-flam and conniption.

Because of its relative rarity, I would understand if you decided to save a bit of memory space by having the XT9 predictive engine on your phone not know what the word was.

Clearly, you have done so.

However, when I try to type "whatnot" you helpfully suggest the following "words":

QGATBOT
QGATBOY

Now, I'm no linguist, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that "whatnot" is a more common word than "qgatboy".

Please address this issue soon, so I can seem a little less insane when I message people from my phone and want to use mom lingo.

John Design, Rants

John Rants

John Rants, Television