David S. Atkinson's Blog, page 178

Who Still Sends Junk Faxes?

We have fax machines at work. As much as it amazes me that we still have fax machines, there are still uses for them. However, I don’t use them much. Should I need to get a fax, they have it configured to email me any faxes directly to my in box. This gives rise to a situation I’ve never encountered before. People still send junk faxes.

Seriously, every couple of days I get some poorly rasterized image about roofing, loans, vacation offers, and other similar junk. Who still sends these things? I know people send spam emails because a certain portion of the population actually falls for them, but junk faxes? Is anyone still listening to these?

I just can’t believe someone still sends these things. I have no cause to receive faxes 99.99999% percent of the time. I can just delete these immediately unless I’m expecting something in particular. It just baffles me that someone is still bothering to send them. I can’t even respect them as spammers, which isn’t much to begin with.

My Wife Is No Longer Allowed To Use Packing Tape On The Furniture/Stairs

My wife is no longer allowed to use packing tape on the furniture or carpet. Our cats have been scratching a bit at a couple couches and chairs and on some of our carpeted stairs. My wife got the bright idea to put packing tape over the commonly scratched bits, rolled a little at the ends so it would stick but the adhesive side would face out.

This was supposed to discourage scratching.

And, it probably did. However, the tape wasn’t stuck very well like that. The other problem? Our cat Oscar is kind of dim.

Twice now I have come downstairs to see Oscar wandering around completely oblivious to the fact that a half foot or so section of packing tape is dangling from his face, mashed into his whiskers. Literally, he was walking around both times like he had no idea it was there. It was mashed down on his whiskers pretty good too. I had to make my wife hold him both times while I held his whiskers near the base and tried to pull the ends from the tape.

They were really on there, most of their length, and I wanted to make really sure I wasn’t pulling his whiskers out of his face. Poor little dim guy.

I’m not sure if he lost any whiskers on this or not. He didn’t seem to be fond of the process, but I don’t think I hurt him. He didn’t squeak or anything (he doesn’t exactly meow or talk much), and he seemed to forget the entire thing a moment later.

I’m just glad I managed to free him both times without significant problems. Clearly we can’t use packing tape to keep the cats from scratching on stuff. It’s too dangerous with Oscar around.

An IKEA Joke!

I came up with an IKEA joke! A friend and I were making fun of IKEA names on Facebook (including references to IKEA or death metal) and I came up with the below. As usual when I amuse myself too greatly with a comment I make on Facebook, I decided to share it here to get more mileage out of it.

Okay, now the joke. What do you get at IKEA for the person who has everything? Lack!

#FeedCthulhu

I just wanted to spread the word a little about the #FeedCthulhu thing that Ross E. Lockhart and Word Horde are doing. They’re hoping that as the United States gets ready to celebrate Thanksgiving people will think of others and donate to some food charity they support.

All you need to do is donate in some way to a food charity. Then post I fed Cthulhu [your donation] to [organization] #FeedCthulhu @lossrockhart on social media (filling in the brackets with your respective info). If you do that and send publicity[at]wordhorde[dot]com a link to your post, they’ll send you an ebook copy of their latest anthology, Cthulhu Fhtagn! (just let them know in the email if you prefer ePub, mobi, or PDF format).

They’ll be checking social media for the hashtag and selecting three random posts on December 1 to get personally autographed copies of the book too. Cool, right?

Just give it a thought. It’s good to work against hunger all the time, but it’s something we might want to think about even more at the time of year when we’re thinking about all that we’re lucky enough to have.

“Details” Magazine Is Closing!

Details magazine is closing next month! Apparently, they want to focus more on GQ instead.

In other news, I just learned that there was a Details magazine. I feel like the name must somehow be familiar, but if so I was only aware of it in a vague sense. I certainly wouldn’t have guessed it was a men’s style magazine.

If that situation is common perhaps that could be a reason why it’s closing.

“Not Quite so Stories” Has A Goodreads Page And A Facebook Page! And Amazon And Smashwords Preorder!

Not Quite so Stories (my new short story collection due out March 1, 2016 from Literary Wanderlust) now has a Goodreads page and a Facebook page! Check ’em out!

Give the Facebook page a like to stay up to date on the news of what’s going on with the book.

Just in: you can also preorder the print book on Amazon and the ebook on Smashwords!!

 

I Swear I’ll Stop This Soon

I swear I’ll stop this soon, but I found an animated gif of Ronald Reagan:

How could I not share that?

Snow Animated GIF!

In honor of the blizzard we were supposed to get recently in Denver (no real blizzard as such, some areas got some decent snow whereas others none or only a dusting), let’s look at this snow animated GIF!

Okay, I’m lying. This one isn’t animated. I figured I’d just see how I could get you to look at a still image if I told you it was animated rather than go look for an animated one.

I Need This To Wake Up Today

I really need this to wake up today:

Coffee animated gifs! What a brave new world!

Twinkie Animated Gif!!!!!

Sorry, I’m off on animated gifs again. Guess what? There are Twinkie animated gifs: