Goofy Guys

Dude, that guy just took a hit off Rudolph!

Dec 4, 01:27 PM · from the mouth of Jim

So I had to share this random quote, of myself, from Friday night cuz it was just too random. Sarah and I were volunteering as “Balloon Marshalls” in Denver’s annual Parade of Lights. A Balloon Marshall’s duties are sort of vague at best, but they include overseeing the inflation and deflation of the large character balloons that float through the parade.

We ended up doing a lot more than the standard Balloon Marshall would normally get to do on both nights, but our standard duties of overseeing the deflation occurred as they should. As I was standing next to “The Red Nosed Reindeer” coiling cords and watching him deflate (Pssst, you can’t call him “Rudolph” because of trademarks), a couple approached the half inflated carcass as the woman blurted out “oooh, hey, there’s one!”. Immediately the guy accompanying her ran in, snatched one of “The Red Nosed Reindeer’s” gigantic versions of a balloon end and took a gigantic hit of helium off of it. Both walked away giggling their butts off as he chattered forever in chipmunk voice.

“Dude, that guy just took a hit off Rudolph!” Okay, so I broke the trademark rule, but how often do you get to say something like that!? :)

On another note, volunteering as Balloon Marshalls was fun as hell. As I said, normally our duties would have been to oversee the in/deflation of the balloons as well as to help stage them for the parade and guide them out at the correct times. However, Rudolph’s (f* the trademark, it’s shorter to type) captain bailed out on both nights. Additionally, on Friday due to the extremely frigid ambient temperature, the balloons ended up being very short staffed from volunteer attrition. As a result, we were asked to help out with tugging the balloons in the parade! That alone promised to be a super fun experience, but the plot thickened as we were in the staging area. I was approached by “Jumping Jack’s” captain and was told to go back to Rudolph. They needed a radio on each balloon, and I was carrying one for Sarah and me. I went back and asked where the captain was so that I could be assigned a tether when I was greeted with many a blank stare and the comment, “Uhh, we were told you were being sent back here to be one.”

Ironically, I had the opportunity to look like a deer in headlights while standing under a reindeer that was illuminated by headlights. I calmly walked back to Jack’s captain and said, “Uhhh, what’s up with the captaining situation?” and he replied with something along the lines of, “well, they don’t have one and we want the radio back there… ”.

Well folks, I have officially been the balloon captain of Rudolph “The Red Nosed Reindeer” in the Parade of Lights. :) It was a super cool experience and wasn’t that hard after all. Anyone with a little marching band experience, some common sense, two eyes and a general idea of basic physics can captain one of those balloons through downtown Denver. The crew of volunteers that I worked with on Friday was fun, intelligent and very capable and we did a great job. Saturday night was a bit different since they had plenty of volunteers, so they added Sarah to the captaining mix and we trotted ahead of Rudolph (instead of under) and played captain together (ultimately this ended up being a god-send). Our crew on Saturday night wasn’t quite as with it, but we managed to guide Rudolph safely (albeit with many a hoof scrape) through the parade route.

(P.S. I took a few good drags off Rudolph on Saturday night as we were deflating him. In fact, I took a few w/o intending to and found out that your hearing also gets freaky when your entire environment becomes saturated with helium.)

How was your weekend? :)

Take a hit! [5]

Microsoft designs the iPod packaging

Mar 1, 06:30 PM · from the mouth of Jim

Methinks a few people in this crowd will appreciate this. Make sure you have sound available; the music really makes it.

BTW oh great Iackypoo – it seems as though I’ve had problems posting comments since the upgrade. It presents the preview, but never actually posts after I attempt to submit the final version. Just an FYI…

Update: don’t kill yourself jake – I’m starting to suspect it’s our big f*ing piece of SHIOT proxy server here; I suspect it’s not refreshing the post data or something properly. I’ll try commenting from home since you guys are all seemingly working. The following is my reply to the TyTy.

Hehe – I think my woman would not be happy. :) Last night she was like, “you can pick one: we shoot canon and use mac, or we shoot nikon and use PC.” Though, I later found out that her biggest gripe with the mac was the lack of two buttons (which I shared until I got this G4 and realized that you could use normal two button meese.) She seems more open to the idea of a mac in the house now. :) You really do have to admit that single button mice are inferior – I’ll never let that argument fizzle. :-D It still astounds me that apple just won’t let go…

Either way, as nice as OS X is, my current workstation’ll stay where it is for at least a year or so longer. I’ve tuned it out so much for processing that it’s getting the job done quite well for now.

Now I’m just hurting to have 10.4.x on the G4. I’m dying to try Adobe’s Lightroom beta, but they don’t support Panther. Grrrr…

On another note – mac people don’t make, umm, how you say, “acquiring” software as easy as it should be. Though .dmg files are a tremendously well executed use of great technology, people seem to be over using them. I pulled a certain DVD with some “stuff” on it, later to find that someone had just dumped the contents of “smaller stuffs” into it and partitioned it off. It was all swell and neat from a technological distribution point of view, but not worth a shit if you needed to boot off of one of these “sub-things.” In any case, it was just kinda funny to me. I think I have a “thing” pulling right now that is a true .iso image that’ll be bootable… udderwise I may have to have one of yous guys make (another) attempt at supplying for my needs. And no, I’m not talking technological needs… raarrrr… ;)

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