Prncs Bryd 4Eva

http://xkcd.com/549/

sorry, no mounties pictures yet, Adin, but i'll work on that.

p.s. the comic link is not meant for younger eyes.

New Geography

Since when is London part of Canada?

Or did Maurissa move without obtaining my consent?

It's really hard to get good restraining order enforcement these days.

Mazzucco

Creative Dartmouth grad

I was flipping through the March issue of Reader's Digest and discovered an article about a Dartmouth grad. Apparently, at his reunion in 2007, Jeff Deck realized he wasn't doing anything beneficial with his life. He started the Typo Eradication Advancement League and now travels around the country fixing typos on signs. He was recently sued and fined by the National Park Service for changing a sign at the Grand Canyon, but he has been dubbed the Indiana Jones of typos. That's pretty cool.
I thought it was a creative way to make use of a major in creative writing.
(I tried to find a link to it on the Reader's Digest site, but my computer didn't like it.) The article is called "Righting Wrong Writing" and it's on page 22, if you want to look it up.

Clueless in Alabama or pretty much anywhere

Has the Hurst baby landed? I feel as if that must have happened and yet I have no official confirmation recollection in my mushy brain.

Liberal Arts Education

So by the close of business (COB) today, my team and I are supposed to submit a report document on the results of laser data collected in August by my company. One member of the team volunteered to write up a "boiler plate" which consists of all the non-results related information such as "how we did it", "what we used," etc. Seemingly straight forward correct? Especially when the guy writing it has a title of "Principal Electro-Optical Laser Scientist" right? So...here's some of my favorite highlights of the draft before I spent 5 hrs revising my life away.

1) The use of the word "nominally" as much as 5 times in a page in sentences such as, "Mechanically, the camera was nominally set back from the target screen about 25 feet when positioned at Nohilli Point."

2) The ability to repeat the same concept more than once in the structure of a sentence, i.e. "Sunlight being the main culprit was relatively constant but intensity on the screen did change over time throughout the day operations due to changing position of the sun as well as occasional clouds that would impede sunlight briefly thereby changing the background of the target screen. "

3) And my personal favorite...the use of dramatic effect: "To add more challenges to the air operations, the passenger door on the helicopter was removed leaving roughly 10 ft2 of open area for not only the laser to propagate into the helicopter but the ambient environment as well. On the ground, the temperatures experienced by the crew were relatively mild however, as the helicopter achieved 3800 foot elevations, the air temperatures coupled with the strong prop wash from the main rotor blades created near freezing conditions for the operator next to the open doorway (**adin's note: Guess who the operator next to the open doorway was**). In addition to the cold temperatures, noise from the rotors was substantial and communications suffered from the excess background in addition to some still unknown electrical problems associated with the internal headsets used by the members of the flight crews. The open door created additional concerns with regard to safety. All equipment had to be secured so as to prevent the possibility of something falling out the open pathway and striking the main or tail rotor props the consequences of which are left as an exercise for the reader to consider."

Thank you for exercising as a reader. Have a good day.