Archive for September, 2013

Product Notation

Friday, September 27th, 2013

With the release this month of the new iPhone models 5c and 5s, God and I got to talking about undeclared letters in product names. There’s lots of choices for what those “c” and “s” letters can stand for, and I’m sure that Apple enjoys people spending time speculating about it.

We also spent some time talking about the current lineup of Prius models from Toyota. Unlike the iPhones there’s three models of Toyota’s flagship hybrids, but like the phones there’s only two appended letters. The current lineup is the Prius, the Prius C and the Prius V. When they moved from a single model to a family of models, with the 2012 model year, they added the “c” as a smaller model and the “v” as a larger model.

God asked me if I had any guesses what the “c” and “v” might stand for. I told him I thought it was an obvious homage to the graphical interfaces that grace our personal computers. Oh sure maybe somebody in their marketing department had originally suggested “c” to mean “compact” but that same sort of obviousness doesn’t carry over to the “v”. I think somebody was thinking of the original Macintosh and it’s introduction to the world of command-c for “copy” and command-v for “paste”. What they “cut” from the “c” to make it smaller, they “pasted” to the “v” to make it larger.

That Ain’t No Rose

Friday, September 20th, 2013

Sometimes instincts are no fun.

I’ve had occasion a few times in the last week to note some sort of bad odor. It’s been nothing awful but it’s happened enough that I was able to notice a pattern. I’m going along breathing, minding my own business, when my nose catches a whiff of something noxious. Then, rather then doing the sensible thing and holding my breath for a few moments while the scent goes on to wherever it’s going, my alertness perks up and I quickly breathe in a little deeper, the better to experience and catalog just how bad the badness of the odor is.

God says this is important. God says some odors need to be dealt with quickly, like smoke, or skunk, and that the smells need to be understood in order to react correctly. I, on the other hand, am just tired of divining the nuances of the urine that highlights the streets of San Francisco or that permeates the clothing of the homeless.

I get that the instinct is important; I just wish that it were a little more unconscious.

Lift from the Knees

Friday, September 13th, 2013

Not that it matters to anyone else, but to God and me it’s now down to the wire. Tonight I’ll spend my first night in my new house. My bed won’t actually be there until tomorrow, so tonight it’ll sort of be like camping in a really big, really nice cabin with central heating and air. So not roughing it, but not decadent either.

God and I haven’t gotten to talk all that much this last week. She’ll say something and I’ll sort of grunt in response as I hoist another box and carry it out to the car. When I think about it, right about now I could really use some decadence. God says moving my own stuff helps build character. I think that means, helps me to see that I not only should let a lot of this stuff go, but I actually could.

There’s nothing quite like packing all of your stuff into boxes and hauling it around to help you develop a healthy sense of detachment from material things.

Or make you cling to it all that much more. Hmm, I guess I’ve still got a ways to go. Maybe I should practice chanting while moving boxes.

Oops, Sorry

Friday, September 6th, 2013

I asked God if anyone noticed that I didn’t post last week. He said they did, but then they got drunk on Labor Day and forgot all about it. I’m not sure if I should take away from that that my readers are a bunch of drunks or that my blog is easily forgotten. Probably both.