Daylight

I got to leave work early today. It was the first time in at least 2 weeks that I got to leave while there was still daylight. But I still had to sit in traffic though. There is loads on construction (of course) near the building where I work. At approximately 1:32 PM, we lost our internet connection. Apparently someone in the construction had cut through the connections and the whole building and who knows what else lost their internet connection.

The saddest thing is this has actually happened to me before. When I worked at my previous job, construction workers did the exact same thing on a different freeway, cut through the communications cables and left us without internet and phone.

Now, when you work for an internet company, there's not a lot that you can do when your internet goes down.

We had an impromptu training session on Collective Action; Game Theory and the Nash Equilibrium. All very heady stuff but definitely enlightening.

The best part of the afternoon was when we played the Prisoner's Dilemma with the betrayer having the opportunity to gain $75 if the opponent stays silent. According to past experience from my boss, he has never had to give out the full amount money because everyone has always chosen to either stay silent against each other or betray each other.

Not today.

I volunteered to play and chose to betray. My opponent chose to stay silent and I went home with $75. {grin}

Thank you to the construction workers who cut the line this afternoon.

Friday Cat Blogging

Princess Mia performs the age old art of head licking on Tiger BF. Tigey thoroughly enjoyed his head licking.

Have you ever?

You know, when you live in a different country from which you grew up, you tend to miss certain things about the country you grew up in. For me, it's usually the food, I mean, of course it's The Food, what kind of Singaporean would I be, if I didn't talk about the food but I also miss the drinks.

One of the things I used to miss most was Tiger beer. I've never really been much of a beer drinker. When I first got to Texas, I used to drink the odd Shiner ever now and then, but wishing I had a Tiger. I would always buy it duty free on my way back from Singapore to the States and ration it out. I think I drank it more for the fact that it was familiar than the fact that I really cared for a beer. It was special because you couldn't buy it in Texas. And then I read that Tiger Beer was going to be distributed in the United States by Anheuser Busch. Woo hoo! That's great, I thought, we're going to be able to get Tiger in Houston and then, I promptly forgot.

That is, until now. While traipsing along in our neighbourhood Kroger, I happened to cast my eyes upon the following:

Cue the music.

Roll the music.

Ready in

3

2

1

Crazy things that you can't stop thinking about

Hubhub and I have been having an ongoing "discussion" about the phrase "I could care less". I first heard this phrase when I was at school in Denton. It took me hearing it in context a few times before I came to understand that it is supposed to mean "I couldn't care less". I attributed it to being a Texas thing. I feel strongly that the correct usage is "I couldn't care less". Hubhub feels strongly for "I could care less". It's really keeping us going over here.

Ever since I read that book by Lynne Truss, I have become super sensitive about word usage, grammar, and of course punctution.

Excuse me, while I pause to accept the award for dullest blogger, evah. Thank you.

Back to the argue-er-discussion. So I googled the phrase to see what I would find of course: couldn't care less

I found this lovely gem from Dictionary.com:

Which is correct: I could care less or I couldn't care less?

The expression I could not care less originally meant 'it would be impossible for me to care less than I do because I do not care at all'. It was originally a British saying and came to the US in the 1950s. It is senseless to transform it into the now-common I could care less. If you could care less, that means you care at least a little. The original is quite sarcastic and the other form is clearly nonsense. The inverted form I could care less was coined in the US and is found only here, recorded in print by 1966. The question is, something caused the negative to vanish even while the original form of the expression was still very much in vogue and available for comparison - so what was it? There are other American English expressions that have a similar sarcastic inversion of an apparent sense, such as Tell me about it!, which usually means 'Don't tell me about it, because I know all about it already'. The Yiddish I should be so lucky!, in which the real sense is often 'I have no hope of being so lucky', has a similar stress pattern with the same sarcastic inversion of meaning as does I could care less.

And there you have it. It boils down to the British version vs. the American version. It's a running theme in this household!

Friday Cat Blogging

Today, we have a veritable celebritycat: Zeus of Zeusexcuse. See how he mesmerizes us with his smouldering stare? Don't let him hypnotize you into doing his bidding. He is a very powerful cat.