sylvie's Contributions

Moving Fun

July 20, 2009 by sylvie

While the man of the house spent your tax payers money on conference tour to continental Europe last week (he claims it was work!), I was left with the dubious honor of dismantling his lounge furniture for our upcoming move. Fortunately, he owns some fancy schmancy USM Haller designer shelving system that is meant to completely come apart. A kind of steel Lego for grownups. The bad news is that it doesn't work as advertised. As I had to find out, the over-engineered connectors that help binding the corner elements to the straight tubes tend to get wedged inside the tubes, making it impossible to reach the screw at the other end of the same tube.

The ill-designed connectors turned out to be quite a nuisance and for a while I was pretty worried that I wouldn't manage to break the shelf into small enough pieces to get it though the door and down the stairs. At one point I even made a few panicky phone calls to the London distributors. Luckily, in the end patience and a few well placed whacks managed to get the job done, so I have a few more boxes of books, a pile of steel, and an empty wall to show. Oh, and the alcohol collection, which so far has not been packed up. Read more

Pastel Overload

July 11, 2009 by sylvie

Today I folded 500 flyers for a campaign, my running club is doing at the Race For Life tomorrow.  Of course, I don't really have the right to complain as I designed the flyer myself. By the time somebody pointed out that a three-panel layout is bad because it needs two folds per copy I was pretty far advanced and didn't have the energy to start again from scratch. All I could do at that point was to vouch to take care of the folding myself.

In the end the whole thing wasn't too bad anyway. After a bit of testing I was folding only slightly slower than the printer was printing. Of course  I had acquired a mild pastel allergy by the time I was done which had to be cured with a few bright posters. Read more

The Dog Ate The Homework

July 7, 2009 by sylvie

Today's Close to Home reminded me of a time when I shared a house with a woman and her daughter. The kid had just started first grade and for the 100th day at school they got a special assignment: They were given a sheet  of paper with a 10x10 grid and were asked to glue 100 pieces of breakfast cereal into the boxes.

The kid was an eager student, so she finished her homework right after school, then placed it on the table and went off to play. Unfortunately, her aunt's dog soon discovered the sheet and promptly polished off all cereal...

When we adults realized what had happened, we were rolling on the floor with laughter. The poor girl on the other hand was devastated. She clearly didn't see the humor in the situation and nothing we said could convince her to turn in the homework "as is" the next day with the famous words "Sorry Miss - the dog ate my homework!" (Probably just as well since I bet her elementary school teacher couldn't have kept a straight face either!) In the end the girl's mother took pity with her and quickly replaced all the fruit loops.

Unfortunately, I can't quite remember what happened to the dog but I am pretty sure he survived the glue soaked carb loading, However, I can't rule out a (very minor) belly ache.

Nudging Flies Into Urinals

July 4, 2009 by sylvie

I am reading this pretty cool book right now. It's called Nudge, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, two behavioral economists. Their basic thesis is that one can (and should) "nudge" people into doing the right thing for themselves, by exploiting common, often somewhat irrational, behavior, for example by placing healthy fruit at eye level before the sugary desserts in the cafeteria. I am only about 50 pages into the story but I already had a major revelation, although not exactly the way the authors had intended. Read more