Siniestro Mu y Las Vacas Lobotómicas

So Forrest and I were going through boxes, putting away things, when Forrest found a scrap of paper with some Spanish written on it. He told me to search YouTube for it, at which point we stopped cleaning to watch La Tortuga Manuelita. Many clicks of "related" videos later, we came across El Baile de las Vacas:

After recovering from the hypnotic effects of the video, we watched one more on YouTube (Siniestro Mu, El Jingle) before just googling broadly for all the info we could find. (We're not warped or demented, no sir...)

The only two sites with actual animated content that I could find were:

SiniestroMu.com

The official site for El Show de Siniestro Mu y Las Vacas Lobotómicas. It has 3 episodes and 3 comics. ¡Quiero más episodios!

YouTube user siniestromu

This user has uploaded 7 short clips to YouTube. This is all his fault that you're being exposed to it now.

Various newspaper articles (in Spanish) say it's a Saturday morning cartoon from Panama. Where can I get it?? My Google-fu does not seem to be strong enough for this one. :(

This is more or less how I got into Veggietales. Does not bode well. ;)

"Go Home" Outlook Reminder

The Problem

Now that Forrest has moved up here, I have to change my work schedule a bit. When I had no one to go home to after work, I didn't really worry about how long I stayed in the office. Even after I put in my 8 hours, I'd be inclined to stay, reading the Intarwebs. I mean, if I was just going to be internetting when I got home anyway, what difference did it make whether I did it at home or at work?

But now, it's sad if I don't get home until 9 or 10 in the evening, tired enough to want to go straight to sleep, and I haven't seen Forrest all day. So I need to save my time-wasting (such as blog posts, hrm...) for when I'm at home, where at least we can waste time together. :)

The Geeky Semi-Solution

I will lose track of time, though, if left to my own devices. So I wrote myself a little custom "Go Home" button in Outlook, which creates an alarm 8 hours from when I get to work, that pops up and tells me to go home.

Partly to document it, and partly to help out anyone else who might like to program something similar, here's how I did it. In the Visual Basic Editor (Alt-F11 from within Outlook), I created a new function:

Sub CreateGoHomeEvent()
    Dim message, title, defaultValue As String
    Dim arrivedAtWork As String
    Dim appt As Outlook.AppointmentItem
    
    message = "When did you get to work today?"
    title = "Start Time"
    defaultValue = DateTime.Now
    
    arrivedAtWork = InputBox(message, title, defaultValue)
    If arrivedAtWork = "" Then
        ' If the returned value is blank, the user hit cancel.
        Debug.Print "Cancelling; did not create an appointment."
        Exit Sub
    End If

    Set appt = Application.CreateItem(olAppointmentItem)
    With appt
        .Categories = "Important!,Processed"
        .Subject = "Go home, it's been 8 hours!"
        .Start = DateAdd("h", 8, arrivedAtWork)
        .End = .Start
        .BusyStatus = olFree
        .ClearRecurrencePattern
        .ReminderMinutesBeforeStart = 15
        .ReminderSet = True
        .Save
    End With
    
    Debug.Print "Created a 'Go Home' reminder for " & appt.Start & "."
End Sub

Then I customized the Outlook toolbar to include a button that calls this new macro. It prompts me for the time I got to work, defaulting to the current time. If I click the OK button, it creates a new reminder task with an alarm that goes off 8 hours from that time. It's simple, but useful. Here's a screenshot of it in action, with the "Go Home" button on the far right of the toolbar, and a red rectangle in the "To-Do Bar" being the task sitting there, waiting to trigger its pop-up window alarm:

Update, Wednesday 11:35 AM: Added in the missing code to actually trigger the reminder itself. Setting ReminderMinutesBeforeStart = 15 is not enough; you also need to set ReminderSet = True for the reminder to trigger.

Graupel is Weird

Footprints in the Graupel

Strange April weather! It's like pellets of snow, which Wikipedia says may be graupel. Weird stuff.

They Call Me Dandelion Bane

They Call Me Dandelion Bane

I got up this morning intent on being constructive. Being DEstructive isn't so far off. :)

Eggly Eyes

Eggly Eyes

Forrest is a good cook, and sometimes a silly one. :)

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.

Phone Banker Fee Refunded, FTW!

I check all my financial accounts through Yodlee pretty compulsively consistently, and tonight I noticed an odd $2 charge from "Phone Banker Call 01/30". Now, $2 is not a big deal, but not having any idea what the charge is does bother me, so I called up my bank to see if they had any more information on what the charge was.

The customer service rep told me that it was a fee from Wells Fargo itself, for speaking to a banker about something that the automated phone system could have handled. He listed off the types of services that count, and all of those things I do exclusively online. I hate the phone and avoid it wherever possible; simple things that the automated phone system could handle, I would just do online myself. I said as much, and added that I couldn't remember making any such phone call.

He very politely, and without any prompting on my part, offered to refund the fee. FTW! It's only $2, but I don't recall doing the thing they say they charged me for, so I'll have the fee refunded, thankyouverymuch. :)

If I had made such a phone call, I think I would have remembered if the banker had mentioned at the end, "Oh, and by the way, this call just cost you $2 in fees. Have a nice day." I don't recall ever knowing that such fees were possible. I assume that somewhere buried in the fine print of the Terms of Service it's been updated to say this fee exists, but overall it seems pretty shady and lame to me.

Some quick Googling shows that this fee isn't new after all. Blogger Toby Getsch wrote about this in 2006, and the Oakland Tribune in 2003. If Wells Fargo ATMs weren't everywhere, I would have dropped them several years ago... *sigh*