Note that there are no reindeer. My guess is that they met the same fate as Luke Skywalker’s tauntaun.
Nearly eight years ago, I started using a CPAP (pronounced “SEE-pap”) machine while sleeping. I have sleep apnea, which I wrote about in April 2008:
Sleep apnea is caused by the upper airway being closed off when the muscles relax during sleep. This cutting off the of the airway leads to a loss of oxygen, which triggers an automatic fight-or-flight response from the cardiovascular system and brain, which causes a waking response. This sort of thing, repeated over and over again, messes with your sleep and puts undue strain on the heart.
The difference between my pre- and post-CPAP life, if you’ll forgive the expression, is like night and day. I feel completely refreshed when I wake up, and I no longer have that mid-afternoon lull where I’m useless and just want a nap. I now use my CPAP every night, and I take it with me when traveling.
I’m wrapping up a week-long business trip to the corporate HQ of my workplace, GSG, in Concord, Massachusetts. When I unpacked my bag on Sunday night, I realized that I’d somehow left behind the straps for my CPAP mask. They’re a key part of the system, as they hold the mask to your face as shown in the picture below:
Luckily for me, I always carry a roll of duct tape in my laptop knapsack. Here’s what my quick-and-dirty test run looked like:
Version 2.0 incorporates a hotel face towel on the back of my head so I’m won’t rip out my hair when I remove the mask in the morning. As for the bacon images, it’s my belief that life’s too short for plain duct tape.
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About once a week, I work out of a cafe rather than at the home office. As you might already know, coffee is a tricky beast that sends you to the bathroom for a couple of reasons. If you’re at the cafe solo, you’re faced with the question “what can I leave at my table to hold it while I’m in the can?”
I could leave a coat or jacket on the chair, but I’m in Florida, where you often don’t have them handy because you don’t need them. That’s when accordion comes in handy: it marks your spot, and accordion thefts, as the joke goes*, are quite rare.
* The joke goes like this: I parked my car in a rough part of town and left my accordion on the back seat. When I got back, my window was smashed in, and I now had two accordions.
Yesterday in Toronto, taxi drivers staged a mass protest against Uber by forming a blockade at Bay and Queen Streets, one of the city’s busiest intersections, located between the old and new city halls, near the large downtown shopping mall, and just north of the financial district.
One protesting cabbie, while talking to reporters, spotted and UberX car and started to pound against the driver-side window and tried to open the driver’s door. The driver of the car attempted to leave the area, but the cabbie would have none of it — he gasped onto the side of the car, and ended up being dragged a short distance. He finally let go, and it appears that no one was hurt in the incident.
You can watch what happened in the video below:
That cabbie probably sees himself as the taxi analogue to the Tiananmen Square Tank Man, but in the publis’s eyes, he’s more like Grampa Simpson:
I’m probably not the first person to make this observation: this may be the first time I’ve seen someone literally dragged kicking and screaming into the future.
Now before you get all self-congratulatory about customers beating the decrepit and corrupt taxi industry, keep in mind that there’s a lot of terrible stuff about Uber as well: