Sunshine State, My Ass

My sister is arriving today, visiting Florida from Ohio. She was dismayed to discover that it will rain, storm, and otherwise enmoisten the state for her entire visit. Welcome to my world.

New Day, New Thunderstorms

This is the weather report for today in Miami - It's a good thing that I don't depend on electricity for my job. Or work with sensitive equipment that could be easily fried by a power surge. Or be without a job if my laptop were zapped.

Wait a moment - all of those things are true!

We do have surge protectors on every important outlet (would it help to plug a surge protector into a surge protector? Twice the protection, no? No?) but I'd be happier with a few heavy duty UPS units - or even better, enough of them to run my laptop for up to eight hours, (my laptop battery lasts about an hour and half) in case there's an all-day storm. But what are the chances of that?

It happens about twice a week, it turns out.

I have two computers running side by side - My laptop, which I use to do my testing, and a crappy old Win98 box that I use to type out notes and do the actual bug writing with. It's a huge pain and a timewaster to jot everything down on paper, just to type it in again.

To avoid using two keyboards and two mice, I bought a KVM switch which has worked out pretty well. I use a separate monitor, just so I can watch the game as I type the notes - it makes stepping out a bug a lot easier.

I'd like to recommend the KVM switch I bought, the USB/USB (F1DG102U) - I was worried that using a Win98 system as one of the PCs would cause problems, but it's worked great. I've had it a week, and no problems at all. There's this ever so cute little button that you use to switch between PCs (some KVM switches use shortcuts on the keyboard, but I wanted to make sure this software wasn't interfering with the game testing).

The actual switching process takes about 5 seconds, once you hit the button. It seems like forever sometimes, but it's 5 seconds - so it's not designed for very rapidly jumping back and forth. You learn to adjust to the lag time.

Ninja XTreme!

I was watching The Weather Channel yesterday (A necessity in FL) and they were forecasting Extreme UV Levels in the morning, and Severe Thunderstorms in the afternoon.

For a moment, I blinked to myself and wondered why I was choosing to live in a state where terms like 'Extreme' and 'Severe' are tossed around on a daily basis, like it aint no thing. Oh, right - I was doing it for el-oh-vee-ee (the perfect justification for anything short of genocide).

As I take my morning walks around the neighborhood, I often notice women with parasols, big hats, or just holding their briefcases in front of their faces to block the sun on the way from their apartment to the car. I'm not joking - for the 30 feet it takes these women to get to the car, they're blocking out the sun like it's serious bad ju-ju.

The sun IS serious bad ju-ju.

Unfortunately, guys can't get away with carrying a parasol. Big hats don't go well with office clothes. And blocking out the sun with a briefcase on the way to the car would make a man seem like some sort of pansy - (not from my point of view, but our culture is tough on men). I suppose it's all about the packaging and marketing.

A male parasol could work, if it was designed properly and advertised just so.

"I'm Brock Brickly, of the Dallas Cowboys - I'm here to tell you all about The Man Shade, from Schick. Harmful UV is a problem for men too - that's why I use The Man Shade, to keep my skin cancer-free and sexy-soft!"

Instead of looking like frilly umbrella, The Man Shade could be a rugged arc of manly high-tech fabric - like a Special Forces parachute. It could be emblazoned with the faces and jersey numbers of the day's most popular sports stars, proudly showing off the colors of your favorite sports teams, or patriotically cheering on the military branch of your choice.

Semper Fi, indeed.