Journal entries in 'Miscellaneous' for January, 2006

I don't understand why everyone seems to be so averse to mounting a roll of toilet paper. It seems that I often enter a bathroom and find that the previous occupant finished the last roll, opened and used the new one, and then set it on the top of the tank. Really? You couldn't spare the eight seconds to mount the new one on the holder? You shouldn't be in that much of a hurry at the end of your bathroom session, or you didn't do it right.

If it's in someone else's house, I could maybe understand not wanting to violate their sensibilities by mounting the roll the wrong way. In some households, that kind of thing would make sure you were never invited back. But if you finished the roll, then you saw how it was mounted when you came in. And if the roll was already empty when you got there, then I'd wager they don't have particularly strong feelings about it one way or the other.

It's not that it particularly bothers me to find an unmounted roll, I just really can't imagine what causes people to avoid doing it.

Hey, the lost lens turned up. I searched again in daylight and found it under the passenger seat of my car. I looked there though...

It's good to have it back, but it's a bittersweet reunion. I had just about resigned myself to its loss, and had started eyeing the Sigma 10-20mm as a replacement... Now it feels like I'm stuck with this crap lens again :)

I think maybe I wouldn't make a good father.

I think I managed to lose another lens today. This time it's the small 18-55mm lens that came with the camera. But I wasn't hiking through foreign countries this time. I was walking from my car to my house. Somehow, between those two points, I managed to lose track of it. My camera bag was partly open, and apparently it took the opportunity to make its leap for freedom. I searched the front yard extensively, of course, but somehow, it's nowhere to be found.

If I had to lose one, I'm glad it was my cheapest, crappiest lens this time, but it was a useful lens too. Now my only choice is to carry around the behemoth. Awesome.

Gah, that was creepy. My family is out so I'm alone in the house. We're out of good cereals out in the kitchen, but we keep a few other cereals in the hallway by the bedrooms in the back of the house, so I went back there to see what we had. As I was looking through the cereals, I heard a noise in my dad's office, but since everyone is out, I assumed it was my dog, Chelsea. But it sounded like someone rummaging around through files, so I went into the office to see who it was. Oddly, there was no one there, not even Chelsea.

I then walked back out into the hallway, and I turned to find Chelsea standing at the end of the dark hallway, regarding me quietly.

Now, there's no reason for that to be scary — Chelsea is 15 years old, arthritic, deaf, and suffers from liver problems. In her current state she'd have trouble causing damage to a quadraplegic, masochistic doormouse. But to suddenly find her staring at me silently, almost maliciously, it felt just like a scene from a Stephen King movie, like Chelsea was about to make a leap for my jugular and I'd have to run and lock the door behind me in terror. It was totally one of those moments from movies where someone turns to see what's behind them, and it's nothing, and then they turn back and the bad guy is standing right in front of them and the soundtrack suddenly gets loud and you spill your popcorn.

I now have all the lights on.

You may or may not have heard about the WMF vulnerability that was discovered a few days ago in Windows. Odds are, you haven't. The media isn't really talking about it yet, which is unfortunate, because this is a pretty big one. All versions of Windows are affected, there are already dozens of different exploits in the wild, and Microsoft has not released a patch, nor is it likely they will for another week or more. I hate posting something here that feels a lot like those 'virus warning' forwards you hate getting from your more wide-eyed friends, but this is important and nobody seems to have heard about it. There's a FAQ available here.

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