Orange Microsoft Crates

Orange Microsoft Crates

These are the intra-office moving crates Microsoft uses. They're not really all that intrinsically interesting; mostly I just wanted to test moblogging from my new phone. :)

House!

Westlake House

Forrest is up here visiting, looking for rental houses with me in anticipation of his moving up here in mid April. We looked at several houses, but there was only one that we were really happy with. So today we put in our applications and the deposit (oof). They haven't approved it yet, so it's still possible we won't get it, but we very probably will. Exciting! :)

You can wander over to Forrest's Flickr set of photos of the house to check out the house. It's in the Westlake neighborhood of Seattle — not as nice (or pricey) as Queen Anne up the hill, but still okay.

Update, Monday 11:10 AM: Omg, we got the house! That was some fast turnaround time on the landlord's part, and she's not even physically in the state at the moment. (Her daughter has been doing the legwork of actually showing us the house.) The move-in date is April 1st, ie tomorrow, so it sounds like as soon as we sign the lease we can start moving in. Wootles!

Skills of an Artist, er, Linguist

My manager stopped by just a minute ago. "I need help of a linguist," my manager says to me.

"Oh?" My manager speaks English as a second language; Russian is his native language. I figured it was related to that somehow.

He hands me a sticky note with "Gene" written on it. "Is English name?" he asks. "How do you pronounce it?"

I laugh and tell him it's /ʤiːn/, just like DNA-type genes.

He thanks me, commenting that if he's going to be calling this big-shot consultant, he'd better get his name right. I was glad to be service. :)

Gold star and a happy face to those who recognize what this post's title is referencing. :)

Motion Sick from Ball Chairs

Ball Chair (©Mitchell Joyce)

I had read that using exercise balls as office chairs was supposedly good for your posture and core muscles — you're constantly making minute adjustments to stay balanced. I'd noticed some used (and unused) ball-cum-chairs in others' offices and was curious if they were all they were cracked up to be. So I asked my coworker Rachel if I could borrow hers. (She has one in her office but I've never seen her use it.) She said sure, so I brought the thing back to my office.

I'll admit, it was fun for a few minutes, bouncing around at my desk and generally feeling pretty silly. :) But as I settled down and started to just use it as a chair, I noticed that I was developing a headache. I was actually getting motion sick from the darn thing! My inner ear sure is picky — to the list that includes elevators and car acceleration, I can now add exercise balls. :(

Thus ended that short-lived experiment in alternative office furniture.

I later googled around about the benefits of ball chairs and found (surprise, surprise) that not everyone agrees.