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Surgeon General Warning: This post is largely self-aggrandizing.  Skip to the previous post to hear about my brother’s pr()n habits.

I’ve windmill slammed my phone, again. Everything appeared fine until the alarm didn’t go off.  Well, it did but produced no sound.  I thought I may have just missed it so I set it for 10 minutes and slept for an extra two hours until the stroke of 10:30.  As a final check, I set the timer for 3 seconds and when done heard nothing.  Hm…  until I get it fixed, I’ll have to put it in my pocket with enough change so it’ll jingle.

I get to work in time to miss lunch with coworkers and discover that I have until the stroke of midnight to relearn the rules of Magic and pass the L2 Recertification exam.  I started scanning like it was my job, which it is, using the time while documents were going through the ADF to figure out the interaction of continuous effects and re-read the penalty guidelines while taking bathroom breaks.  Wizards.com, and most Magic sites are blocked at work as “games” so I prepared by repeatedly hitting the “random” button on magiccards.info.  I needed an 80% to pass, took a practice exam got a 67%, cried a little, and started the main exam.  119 minutes and 41 seconds into the 2 hour exam I hit the submit button. I got a 90%.  This is the statistical analog of a dog winning “The Weakest Link” because everyone just overlooked him or my brother passing a breathalyzer test because a muon arced some logic chip.  Ignoring the CONFIDENTIAL note at the top I printed it out and placed it proudly on fridge.  I celebrated with the materials on hand and liberally applied butter cream frosting to a freezer-burnt chocolate waffle.  It didn’t taste quite right so I washed it down with the last of the Sparkling Apple Cider left over from New Years.

I hear to get L3 I have to beat an existing L3 in ritual combat and consume their brain to gain their understanding of copying effects and 2HG rules.  I recognize this post is largely me congratulating myself but there was no one awake for me to scream to except the now very confused players on my Team Fortress 2 team.

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I’ve started my new “secret project” that involves a whole new type of scanning and folding.  I go to the point where I had to scan a size D drawing (22 x 34 or two sheets high and four sheets wide using a 8.5 x 11 in portrait) and our large format scanner wasn’t working.  I alerted my coworker what to do and after a while this was the best we could do: scan it in small sections, open the PDFs the small scanner creates and size the to 100%, take print screen of each section and paste it into either a paint or publisher file, convert it to greyscale and then print it as a PDF.  I gave this method a test drive and am proud to say it only takes around 32 times longer than simply using the large scanner when it is working properly.

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The drawings I’ve been scanning have gotten successively larger and more unwieldy to the point where I think I’m scanning life size drawings of art deco skyscrapers.  Put in top, start feed, get coffee, drink coffee, get more coffee, pee, answer questions about the large hadron collider and return to catch the tail end entering the scanner.

Everyone’s been really polite about how profoundly boring the job is and the person responsible for most of them asked what he could do to make this easier in the future.  My reply: make nothing that can’t fit inside a pack of cigarettes.