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One of my all-time favorite pastimes is saleing. Garage saleing, yard saleing, rummage saleing, you name it. If there’s a large pile of household junk that someone’s selling, then I’ll be there, picking through it. It’s hard to explain; there’s just something sublime about finding stuff that I definitely don’t need and then incessantly haggling over its price.

For as long as The City (as I'll call it) has supplied water to its residents, it has had one big headache called "The Annual Water Survey." Like residents of all large metropolises, The City's residents want to make sure the water they drink has only a miniscule amount of the "bad stuff," such as heavy metals and pathogens, and just the right amount of the "good stuff" -- chlorine, fluoride, etc. The water survey -- a 100-plus-page report that details test after test after test -- was their vote of confidence.

"I took this picture at the local post office," George writes, "I guess they must have installed the same computers they use in airplanes and hospitals."

CommQuack hires like crazy. They hire in good times, they hire in bad times. They hire before, during, and after periods of massive layouts. Only one department was sheltered from the endless churn of hirings and layoffs — HR. For a company of ten thousand people, the fact that one thousand of them worked in HR should tell you something.

 

No one really liked Martin P. This is not to say that Martin was unlikeable per se, it’s just that everyone seemed to have a hard time getting over his unofficial title: the CEO’s sycophant.

"Looking back," Nathan Redding wrote, "I really should have taken advantage of this offer. I'm not quite sure we'll see 0% interst rates with $0.00/month payments again any time soon..."

As the seasons change and years pass, trees accumulate rings that can be used to determine the age of the tree. This is a result of seasonal growth — the inner section of each ring is formed in the early part of the rapid growth season; this wood is called "early wood" (*snicker*). Then as the temperature changes and growth slows, the darker outer portion of the ring forms ("late wood"). And who can forget the classic scene from Vertigo in which Kim Novak's character hints at a passion for dendrochronology as she finds the years of her birth and death on the rings of a tree. Why do I bring this up? Because seeing bits of the past frozen in time is fascinating.

For several years, Clint's company has been working on a game that's undergone several engine and tool changes. And I'll stop you right there- it's not Duke Nukem Forever because this game exists, and has been released.

For as long as anyone could remember, there had always been two server rooms: the Cool Room and the Hot Room. The Cool Room was exactly what you’d expect a server room at a mid-sized technology services firm to be: floor-to-ceiling racks along the walls filled with various servers, battery backups, monitors, and KVMs, all tied together with Ethernet and power cables that were neatly tucked in their trays. And, of course, it was a cool 65°F thanks to a pair of dedicated air conditioning units.

"All I want to do was take out some cash at the Huntsville, Alabama airport," Monty wrote, "unfortunately, I wasn't quite prepared and my brain threw a Divide_By_Zero error."

"Root beer guy." That's what Dale had always called Burt in his internal monologue. He occupied a similar space in Dale's mind with "Too much makeup" lady, "I always go tanning" guy, and "I always talk about horses" lady. Burt was one of the ever-present background characters of the office, his only differentiating trait a bottle of root beer. And even though he was a net-admin and Dale worked helpdesk, their paths had never really crossed.

Michael F. arrived to an ugly sight — an inbox full of messages with the same subject line. "ERROR: Invalid data near '<Carrier '" And that could only mean one thing. The shipping software company had released a patch to their web service. Having suffered through updates of ClearPath Logistics' software before, he knew exactly how this was going to go.