The Book of Merle

11:00AM - on apparently being apparent

Stuck waiting for the light to change on a street corner, a person next to me kept glancing over, and finally asked how I was doing. After that exchange, he said "you look like a programmer.. you work with computers?". Baffled at how he could discern that (I wasn't wearing a geeky shirt) I agreed that I was. He said something like "I thought so. A friend of mine in Maine is an open source guru. Do you work with open source?".

I said, alas, no, because it has been many years since I have contributed much to open source projects. Pretty much since around the time the term was popularized. I do use open source, but that does not count in my mind. We then (luckily for me) went in different directions.

But it makes me wonder: is there a sort of vibe programmers give off? I was just standing there. Plain shirt, jeans, trenchcoat, backpack. It was completely bizarre.

10:00AM - holiday specials

It was rather neat to be able to find the Doctor Who holiday episode just a few hours after it aired. BBC America claimed they would offer an online viewing or torrent or some such, but there was no evidence of that yet (probably waiting for the time zone to catch up), so I felt no remorse at going to my usual place. It took a few hours, but was remarkably fast considering there were only two seeds.

Then I decided to experiment. Whenever my laptop is on and running Azureus (now called Vuze for whatever reason), my TiVo magically sees this new place it can get content from. It didn't see the show, but a little playing in Azureus led me to drag the file onto another folder. It then spent about 15 minutes doing what seemed like transcoding, translating it to what a TiVo might like to consume. Then I had to tell the TiVo to download it.. wherein it apparently transcoded it as well, because an hour and a half later only thirty minutes of it had been processed. Then my router crashed (it does that every month or so just to keep me on my toes), so it aborted, and I had to start it over. Overall, it seems like it will take about 3.5 hours to move an hour's worth of video onto it (sans router crashes).

The reason I would do so is mostly to be able to use a remote control for volume, pause, and the lovely skipping back feature of the TiVo. With some planning ahead it could be worth it. For a quickie, though, definitely not: I could have watched the episode a long time ago. I'm also concerned about the double transcoding, because that is never good for quality. It's a tradeoff.

The episode itself (from the few minutes I watched) looks only passable, as all their specials have been. Eh. It has Mars boy, so I'll enjoy that bit.

9:00AM - good timing

According to the news, someone on a plane from Amsterdam to Detroit set themselves on fire or something yesterday. Details being released barely qualify as details, just something about "a powder mixed with a liquid". Security has been ramped up at all airports.

Just in time for that huge blizzard that is sweeping across the middle of the US. It is going to really suck for the people who travelled for Christmas but were coming home to work next week. Hope y'all are not ones of them.

I so look forward to the obvious forthcoming new restrictions. "Sorry, that's a powder: you can't take any powder onto planes. Oh, and that solid object? Looks kinda like you could make powder out of it. Toss it in this bin over here."

1:00PM - slightly less critical mass

Critical mass, where bikers gather in huge crowds and fill intersections to block off traffic (well, ostensibly to "raise awareness about bicycles", but I assume many are in it simply for the group anarchistic annoyance factor) is always on the last Friday of the month in San Francisco.

Which would be today. On Christmas. Apparently it is still on.

I wonder how many attendees they will have, and how they will manage to disrupt traffic in a practically deserted downtown area.

10:00AM - health care

It is disheartening to know that most health care stocks went up on Monday after the news of the first senate passing of the "reform" bill, and they also went up in pre-opening trading yesterday when the latest revised bill announcement was made. It kind of makes one wonder why the people, cash strapped due to insane health care premiums, have decided that those very same companies are going to be doing better.

But it is easy to read anything in tea leaves. As a whole the industry is up (slightly) less this year than many others. It could just be the economic rebound; one certainly hopes so. I have this sneaking suspicion, though, that by forcing customers onto these insurance companies they will simply get richer. We shall find out when the bill takes effect (presuming it does, of course).

12:00PM - patriotism

Working through a puzzle magazine I came across a word seek puzzle where the theme was patriotism. You know, big grid of letters, find all of the list of words/phrases hidden in it. Being a US publication you can guess many of the terms they chose: bill of rights, fourth of july, constitution, republic, liberty bell, allegiance, and so forth.

What you may not have suspected were some of the other words: army, control, energy, force, power, strength, victory, and.. white. Now, white is actually not as bad as you might think since red and blue were also listed, but still, the rest are words I associate more with supremacism than with patriotism. If they really are patriotic terms, then where were subjugation, colonization, and dominion?

Penny Press needs some serious quality control.

2:07PM - the six 'F' steps to feeling stupid

1. Find something you want to print out and read over the long weekend.
2. Forget over and over to take it into work.
3. Finally remember (at home) to plug in an MP3 player using its special cable and upload it (this would be the main point of failure).
4. Finally remember (at work) to go print it out.
5. Find out that of course you did not bother to pack the special cable, because, duh, it's an MP3 player and all you need are headphones! You use your flash drive for files, after all.
6. Feel stupid.

9:00AM - inefficient walks

I forgot the golden rule this morning: never ever ever put a Netflix return envelope into your coat pocket or backpack. You will not remember about it until after you have walked past all of the convenient post office boxes. *sigh*

9:00AM - fair trade: the new organic?

I've noticed a lot more things labelled as "fair trade" or "fair wages" recently. Purchasing them is supposed to make one feel happy, because the money goes back to the workers, who supposedly are not in sweat shops living on three grains of rice a day. Supposedly.

I worry because a lot of the products are competitively priced. Some stores want a bit over what you would pay for an "evil mass-produced" version (and some boutiques want quite a lot more), but enough are around the average price to make me wonder. Although apparently there is a "Fairtrade" certification, I do not think I have seen it on the label of anything I have ever bought.

So is "fair trade" as meaningless as "organic"? At least with local organic food you can sometimes go out and visit the farms (there is still the trust factor that your food came from that farm if you buy it in the market). I'm not willing to travel to Botswana or Laos just to find out if the money from my new bowls are actually going to the workers. It worries me that this could easily be abused to make customers feel good about their purchases when they are really produced the same way as other third-world products are. Supporting an expensive and meaningless pair of words is not my cup of tea.

12:00PM - deadlines

Having worked in the software industry for just a couple of years, I know a little bit about deadlines: especially deadlines that are arbitrarily set by management, against the better judgment of the developers. There are usually two outcomes.

One is that a few days before the deadline they will realize "oh no, we're going to miss this!" and push it out a few more days. This is good in the short term because the workers have already been putting in long hours, and now you can get them to put in even longer hours, while slowly pushing the deadline back, until it is met. Then you set your next deadmens' march deadline. It is clearly bad in the long term because it only takes two projects before the drones detect the pattern and stop caring.

The other is that you simply force the deadline. Some features might not be there, there may be tons of bugs, and the workers have to slave right up to the last minute in a frenzy to finish. This technique is excellent for middle management because it shows skills at meeting deadlines. It also results in a shoddy first-generation product. This has happened for a long time, but I feel it became prevalent and accepted during the browser wars, when "alpha release" meant you would not wish it on your dead dog, "beta" meant "developer alpha", and an actual release was something you should still fear for several revisions. But at the end of the day, the deadline was met. Bonus!

The second, alas, is how I feel the senate treated the health care bill. Toss in concessions and amendments at the last minute just to raise the vote count from 58% to 60%. Little review, no debugging, just release it and see what happens. After all, this way they met their arbitrary deadline. Now they can take their long Christmas holiday in peace! (which they would have done anyway) And this way they kept their promise to pass a health care reform bill.

I'm actually for the Republicans who are saying the entire bill needs to be read out loud before it is enacted. I would take it one step further: it needs to be read, every single Senator needs to be there listening and paying attention, and they need to have discussions after each section to debate the merits and defects. This is not a voluntary system upgrade. There have been so many versions and revisions that if this were a computer purchase I would not even know whether I was getting Windows or OSX or Linux.

I've worked on Thanksgiving, Christmas, my birthday, the 4th of July, you name it. I expect no less from someone who supposedly represents me. If they missed their arbitrarily chosen deadline, tough luck.

It is nice that they get to take their magical holiday off from their jobs. And by "nice", I mean exactly what you think I mean. It makes me laugh to think of the several feet of snow expected today on the east coast, and the fact that their flights home may be grounded. What comes around, goes around. One hopes.

8:00AM - random conversations

Walking towards the bus depot, I heard a brisk *clip* *clip* *clip* behind me, suggesting someone in low heels was quick-walking.^* I moved over to the side more so she could pass, and as she did so, she called out at me "I used to think there were diamonds in the sidewalk".

Being my normal facile conversational self, I said "oh". Glancing down at the sidewalk, it was indeed one of those sections where they mixed in small quartz crystals to make it glitter when the light catches it right. I managed to call out "it does shimmer quite a lot!" when she was still only a few feet ahead of me.

Which was amazingly good, and shows that my tact circuitry is intact, because the two things that came to mind first were "why are you telling this to a complete stranger?" and "so, did you bring a pickaxe out and mine them?". I will never handle random quick conversations suavely, but was proud that I managed to say something that did not completely suck.

^*I assumed female by the sound of the heels and cadence, and males rarely move at a speed between walking and jogging. Also, low heels, because you would be a fool to try that in high heels, and high heels have a smaller footprint so would make a different noise.

5:00PM - more fun with Oracle SQL!

The translate() method (similar to unix tr) is exciting due to how Oracle considers empty strings to be nulls:

SQL>select translate('foobar','oa','') from dual;

SQL>select translate('foobar','oa',' ') from dual;
f  br
SQL>select translate('foobar','zoa','z') from dual;
fbr

The latter being basically what I want to do: completely strip out certain characters. So I just need to add in a character that I translate to itself (or resort to many nested replace() calls). Wonderful. Intuitive!

10:00AM - the raisin tree

This morning I was doing a puzzle in the bathroom which required finding twenty fruits in a graph of letters. I did decently well, getting sixteen (including "grape"), but missed four. Two of them were obvious, one was less so. The other? It was "raisin".

Raisin? Raisin? "Honey, I'm just stepping out to the grove in the backyard to pick some raisins."

Stupid Penny Press. I can't wait for my World of Games subscription to resume.

5:00PM - Ranka attack!

There is probably something that should embarrass me about slamming out code at work while my head is bobbing from side to side and my feet are keeping beat with the Ranka-chan JPop from Macross Frontier OST. But I can see why the album hit #3 in Japan (overall weekly album sales), and the office was mostly deserted today which meant few people noticed me doing so.

Besides, I've passed through my own custom-designed AMA program: "Anime Music Anonymous". Instead of the long drawn-out process of twelve steps, we only have two:

Step 1: acceptance: accept that you really like good anime music.
Step 2: acceptance: say "yeah, whatever", and get on with listening to it.

Were I greedy I would sell instruction courses and DVDs and support sessions and become rich. Instead, I offer this program into the public domain.

8:00AM - hair

I am often disappointed that my body expends a lot of energy growing hair where I do not want it, while not bothering to grow it where I do want it. Where is simple mind-body control when you need it? For that matter, evolution? There are certain parts of the body where I am pretty sure nobody really wants hair. Take, for example, the armpit. The only use I can see in armpit hair is for young males to prove some visible test of adulthood, and even then it only has an effect within that population. Do young females actually want their dates to have luxurious armpit hair? Yeech. I think not. Also, it does little for warmth, unless you habitually wear armless garments and hang from trees. So why are we still hanging onto it?

Save us, Darwin!

1:00PM - more signs of the apocalypse

I'm sorry. But Sarah Palin and William Shatner, on screen together on a late night comedy talk show?

*shudder*

As Dave might say, "my god, it's full of ex-stars!".

11:00AM - blergh

Sore throat, not feeling great, so playing hooky today. It really has nothing to do with the hour-long backup on the Bay Bridge which would seriously cramp my commute. I just want this persistent sore throat to go away.

I could blame the cold weather, but this is pretty mild compared to some parts of the country, and I do not think getting cold causes getting a cold: it might lower your immune system slightly but that's about it. The morning news has been fun the last two days, though. They go on and on about snow ("enough to make a snowball out of!"), ice, and that dreaded black ice. One of the reporters mentioned that their van was "out of control" for several seconds and that he was terrified. Dude, if you don't know how to drive, maybe you should stay home? Sheesh! What, did he grow up in San Diego? Maybe before being granted a license to drive anywhere in the country people should be required to know how to drive in conditions they might encounter. I had to learn how to parallel park, and where I grew up you did not need that skill.

It is probably not feasible to enforce testing drivers in rain, sleet, snow, ice, fog, high winds, and the like. Alas. It would be a neat idea, though. Just like in video games where you get an award for doing things, insurance companies could give you a deal for being a good driver in any weather.

8:00AM - the day the music died

A few nights ago, I was turning over in bed, in one of those semi-asleep phases where I'm aware but know I won't be in a minute. As has been usual for a long time, my internal jukebox was playing. Sometimes it plays recently heard songs, sometimes songs that match my mood or tempo, and sometimes really bizarre things. This time it was some of Henry Mancini's Pink Panther music. That was fine. But as I was shifting back into sleep mode, I heard this loud *snap* or *click* in my head.

And then complete silence. No soundtrack. Just.. nothing.

It scared the crap out of me. I wondered what I had broken. Or if I was the main character in that Jim Carrey movie, and the lack of a soundtrack meant they were closing down the set. Well, not really; I assumed I had broken myself somehow. I still had music: I could think of songs and hear them, but as soon as my conscious threads stopped running through the songs they would stop playing.

Luckily after an afternoon nap I had a sporadic jukebox, and after the next night everything returned. For now things seem to be back to normal. I still wonder what happened. If it happens again I might have to have an MP3 player embedded in my head, much like a pacemaker, and it seems unlikely that this would be covered by my health insurance, whether the magical government plan goes forward or not.

12:00PM - dubai

Dubai, Dubai.. I just have to point my finger and cry out "ha, ha!". You wanted to be the luxury banking centre and ultimate resort area, so you borrowed $60B? The wannabe nouveau riche are always funny. (yes, they had a lot of money before, but the analogy fits)

What does surprise me is the reaction the markets had. Europe was down 4% yesterday, then Asia down 5%, and it looks like the US will be down 2% today (yesterday the markets were closed, and everyone is still standing in line outside Walmart so can't be bothered to do stock trading). That isn't the part of it that surprises me: of course it would cause a huge panicked reaction. It would be like Bill Gates announcing that all his properties were in foreclosure and he was going to sleep in a cot in his office at Microsoft: there's going to be a huge ripple, even if it should just be a drop in the bucket.

The part that surprises me is that I heard the story about Dubai talking about maybe needing to default on Tuesday. Sure, the formal announcement was not until the next day -- but even when it was announced, trading was still open in the US. Have investment firms learned nothing from the last two years? Some dude comes up to you and asks "yeah, well, things are tight, could I maybe get an interest-free extension with no payments for a while?" and it doesn't send up a red flag immediately?

12:00PM - didn't see that one coming from six miles away...

1. University of California loans the state money to help with the state's budget shortfall
2. UC discovers: woe, we have a deficit!
3. UC regents vote to increase student fees by over 30%
4. news leaks out about a couple of overpaid staff members being given large raises (which only happens, oh, every year)
5. protests and riots

Wow. Riots? Never! Especially not in Berkeley, where a couple of people lived in a bloody tree for a year or so to keep it from being cut down. No. They'd probably meekly hand over the money and go on with life.

9:00AM - health care, again

Well, enough votes went in that they'll be debating it. Which pretty much means it will pass in some form or other. Having heard different numbers on the same day from the same reporters as to the cost or number of pages in the document, who knows what will be in there. One Senator encouraged the public to read the bill. Ha! Most people can't read legalese, and those who do probably do not want to waste several weekends reading a few thousand pages -- pages that will be modified before they get to the end. With the level of technology the government supports for public documents, I am willing to bet that even if they posted the document it would be out of date, and even if they updated it they would not provide diffs. And if I did read it, my voice would be no louder than someone who just made up an opinion.

Whatever. I'm feeling a bit anarchistic today.

There are two things that I believe are in the current version that I don't really agree with. One is the abortion bit. Sure, it won't pass without that, but you know? If you won't cover abortions then you damn well better not cover Viagra or fertility treatments. The road goes both ways, my friend.

The other is forcing people who can to buy insurance. I know, emergency rooms, big expenses, blah blah blah. But if you're young and know you are immortal, you might need that money for something else. I was uninsured for several years. It saved me several thousand dollars every one of those years not to pay for insurance. A thousand bucks can be the difference between starvation and life. Was I lucky? Yeah. But the point is that insurance is not a mandate: it is a gamble. Every payment you make, whether to private insurance companies or to the government, is a wager that you will need more care than the payment costs. And the house never offers games where it will not win overall.

Insurance makes sense for most people. I'm going to stay covered if at all possible, no matter what it costs. Now. Because I'm looking at a single deck blackjack game where the primary and secondary counts are solidly in my favour. In the long run I have the advantage by playing. I do not think that is the case for everyone at all points in their lives, and I do not think it is fair or just to point a gun at someone and force them to play when the deck is against them.

8:00AM - do I get paid overtime for this?

This morning I staggered out of bed at 5am to relieve bladder pressure, and out of the blue realized the problem I was having with my SQL extract code. Then I realized that I should check and see if one of my jobs was clogging up the pipeline, which kept me exhaustedly awake for half an hour as I tried to convince myself that the world would not end.

Earlier this week something similar happened, several relative hours earlier. I've always been for the idea that if you sleep your subconscious self will find interesting connections that you simply cannot force. I like being able to trust my subconscious. Honing it has been a preoccupation of mine for more than half of my life.

But really, working during the middle of the night on weekends is pretty low on my priorities. Maybe I need to teach my subconscious to chill now and then.

8:00PM - The Prisoner, hour one

Presented to you in Twitter format! Well, not quite. Timestamps may not correlate with reality, are stretched to ignore commercials, and there's a cut for the extremely mild spoilers. Plus, I didn't really use Twitter.

0:00: Okay, this could be good.
0:10: Feh, the intro has already ticked me off with its modern frou-frou effects.. looks like every other show.
0:15: The real Number Six would have been doing something useful by now...
( cut just in case you want to be surprised )
0:59:59: Argh, there are five more of these?

Not sure if I'll make it through the rest of these, but I'll try. My recommendation: if you've seen the original, stay far away from this. If you have not seen the original, watch that. It's free (online, legally, too). Might take three times as long but there's ten times the content, easily.

11:00AM - great timing

Last weekend I unhacked my phone, resetting it to defaults, because certain things weren't working. I'm not sure how patches like "hide the annoying Nascar icon" would cause the help system to stop functioning, but it didn't seem like a good thing. (more likely it was that my phone had a different WebOS than the version the WebOsInternals program was trying to patch and the browser ad blocker caused the problem, but it was hard to tell).

So I walked around with a boring unpatched phone for a week. It was.. okay. And yesterday I rehacked it. Completely forgetting to turn off automatic updates. Since updates are patches too, if you have unauthorized patches the other ones probably won't work too well. Or so they warn you, and I would believe them.

So this morning my phone made a little noise, and told me it was downloading the latest update. Onto my patched phone. Argh...

About half of the patches survived, so maybe I'll just reinstall the ones that didn't, like the virtual keyboard and the landscape messaging and the battery indicator. If it doesn't work at least I'm getting good practice at this, and I haven't recustomized my phone much (aside from sorting the icons from the default three pages into six, which is just time consuming).

I do wonder why Palm went straight from version 1.2.1 to 1.3.1. That's an interesting numbering scheme.

11:00AM - The Prisoner

Tomorrow they will air the first set of episodes for the remake of The Prisoner. I have to say, I'm feeling quite conflicted towards it.

On the one hand, the original was an excellent show. Few young people would be able to sit through some of the episodes the original, like "The Chimes of Big Ben", where for long stretches they don't have loud music or explosions or even dialog. Having Magneto in the new one is pretty awesome, too (sorry, Ian, I think of you as Magneto). And from what I saw in the preview, there are a lot of direct references for the old fans.

But I'm not sure how they will manage it with a permanent number two. Several of the episodes revolved around number two being replaced due to failure. My favourite, "Hammer into Anvil", has 6 working within the system and completely destroying 2. From their names, the plot is going to be the basis of one of the episodes. I don't see it being nearly as effective.

I'm also worried that the main character is going to be like so many spy heroes recently, a sort of emo Bond/Bourne. It won't be at all the same if 6 is just baffled, falls in love, his love dies, and then he goes on a sort of rampage before somehow escaping. Hopefully I'm underestimating them.

Ah, well. I can't not watch it. Worst case, I'll have something to rant about, and I can go out and grab the new Doctor Who special, also coming out tomorrow. With that one I know what to expect: something between tolerable and sucky. Honestly, have any of those specials been great? I put up with them because I like the universe, but all of them felt like B-writer episodes that they pulled off a shelf because they weren't good enough for the last season.

7:00PM - makes you wonder how the other half live

Tired of feeling lower class? Wanting to really, really one-up your friends to show how much better you are than they are? Look no further! There's Gläce Luxury Ice to rescue you, complete with a heävy mëtal umlaüt!

From their site (which of course is in Flash; why settle for mundane HTML?):

Gläce is a meticulously designed and differentiated drink-ice product. A 'perfectly spherical' 2.5" diameter ice product designed to occupy the top position in the premium ice market.

And here your neighbours and friends probably think ice is just ice! They might not even know about premium drink-ice products.

In addition to unsurpassed quality and peace of mind, Gläce Luxury Ice allows differentiation for those consuming a premium drink from those with less discerning taste.

Yeah, that's right. In your face, lower classes!

When removed from the freezer and its elegant packaging, the ice may be 'aged' for a period of three to four minutes. This 'aging' will allow the ice to acclimate to room temperature and cause a 'frost' to form on the surface.

Normal ice just starts melting. Premium ice ages. *sniffs* "Why, I do say, I detect a whiff of highly purified water!"

Gläce Luxury Ice will 'crackle' and 'spider', but it will not break apart like less deserving ice or home-made ice.

Honestly, I'm not making this stuff up. Just remember, that ice you have in the freezer is probably "less deserving ice". Why, it may be lowering the chances your kids have for getting into Harvard!

Oh, and the price tag? One 2.5" sphere of ice will cost you only $8. It's worth it, don't you think?

6:00PM - when a hammer is not a hammer

Having had a new phone for several weeks now, you would think I would have pimped out my phone with a few ringtones, added all my contacts, have a non-default wallpaper, and the like.

Alas, that is not the case. I am not sure I am using this device correctly. See, what I've done so far is hack it, remove some builtin stuff, ssh into it, make it a wifi hub, give it dynamic DNS, and basically treat it as if it were not a phone. A week after getting it I still was not certain how to send a message from it (it's still a bit iffy: I can reply to prior threads but not initiate them). I have a total of zero contacts set up, aside from ones it auto-imported from gmail (which are mostly useless).

All this will change, because somewhere along the way one of the tweaks destroyed the help system, which I had never bothered to look at but now want to. Partial and full software resets aren't helping; I will have to reflash it, reupdate it, and see how many hacks I can apply before breaking the help system again. Without the help I probably won't be able to learn how to use it the way I'm supposed to.

Maybe I'll leave it as "just a phone" for a few days so I can learn how that part of the device works. It would be nice to have a contact list. Boring and mundane, but at least then I'll be able to place a call without a struggle.

7:00AM - unnatural selection

When I was quite young, I developed distinctive eating habits. One is fairly common: if there are several components on a plate that are part of an integrated meal (say, turkey, potatoes, gravy, and cranberry salad), I will attempt to eat them in equal proportions throughout the meal. A lot of people do that. The other is likely uncommon: if there are simply disparate things, like chips and a sandwich, or like salad and steak, and one is distinctly less tasty than the other, I will finish the less tasty item first. The last bite should always come from the best component.

(This also explains why I'm not keen on dessert: I've never been big on desserts, and why ruin the great taste of my meal with something I don't like? The last thing you eat will be what you taste for a while, and I would rather have it be vindaloo or what not.)

Apparently this rule extends to other things. I started taking chewable calcium pills, and the bottle contains three different flavours: red (yes, I think red is a flavour), orange, and fruit punch. The tastiest of these is the purple fruit punch. So I would open the bottle, glance in, snatch a pill out, and eat it. I wasn't even thinking of choosing one pill over the other. But lo, when the bottle was 3/4 empty, I looked in and noticed all that remained were the purple pills. Subconsciously I had been eating the less tasty ones first, leaving the best for later.

I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. If I were sharing the pills with someone else, it would clearly be bad for me, since I'd be getting only the icky ones (unless we had different preferences and formed an agreement). With food it's okay; I'm big enough now that people don't snatch food off my plate without permission. But it surprised me that my selection style extended to calcium pills.

Maybe it's an argument for intelligent design! This unnamed supreme creator (yeah, everyone knows it is supposed to be that "God" character.. whatever) made all sorts of life, decided the Cro-Magnons and dinosaurs and what not were less tasty, and smote them first, leaving us around. Uh huh. Probably not. I don't think I taste like fruit punch or like vindaloo.

10:00AM - health care

I've stayed away from discussing whether the government should step into the arena of health care or not. Now that they're voting on it today, and it seems likely to pass, I'm annoyed, resigned, and scared.

Scared because it started out as a document longer than even a Robert Jordan book. As soon as it appeared, dozens of offspring, distant relatives, and outright strangers appeared, and all of them wafted around intermingling to see which would be the last one standing. Most of them underwent so many revisions that I doubt a single page has not been altered. And yet, even though I take more interest in the news than many people, I have no idea what their plan precisely is -- and I somehow doubt that those in Congress know either. They probably have the Cliffs Notes summary from their aides, who got a summary from their assistants, who probably got their information off of twitter or something. I would be willing to bet good money that there is something in that bill requiring an expensive bridge to be built in the middle of nowhere. I would also bet that not a single person in Congress has read the entire bill cover to cover, but that's a sucker bet.

Imagine you are on the street, and see a piano rolling down the hill at you, about to crush you. What do you do? Jump left? Jump right? Duck? Jump onto it and pose like a surfer, hoping someone catches it on video to post on Youtube? I'd suggest right or left, since pianos rarely stop rolling gracefully, but either way it doesn't matter: you need to decide now or your tombstone will read "not a great piano tuner; comes with extra sauce".

If instead you are on the street and see a piano at the top of the hill, you have time to prepare. Time to think and reason. Time to run up the hill and attempt to secure the piano, possibly, but certainly time enough to decide which way to dodge so you aren't standing there like a deer caught in the headlights.

I don't think the piano is ten feet away and bearing down on us. Does health care cost citizens a ton of money, mostly used to line the pockets of executives and boost the companies' stock prices? Oh, yeah. Is it any worse than war costs, the hidden taxes found in every service that make things look half as expensive as they really are, or insane compensation packages at major companies? No.

I wish they would take the time to say "whoa, too fast, let's take a step back and meet again in two months; each of us can bring three points to the table". But I fear that this will be the Patriot Act all over again: passed into law before even the supporters realize they have been railroaded.

12:00PM - end of days

In under sixty days I will no longer be able to jot down today's date using a single digit to unambiguously represent the year. Great woe! It'll be back to being like a normal mortal, writing two digit years.

I guess I could use three digits next year, and write 010 as the year. But over the last decade one digit was rational; using three is just being eccentric for the sake of being eccentric. I do enough of that already.

6:00AM - zeno's paradox

A year ago I suddenly developed this weird ability where I would wake up several minutes before the alarm was going to go off. It seemed to handle small shifts in the alarm as well, so long as I knew what they were. It didn't happen often at first, but the effect increased, and it was actually useful once when I forgot to turn on the alarm and still woke up.

But my brain doesn't have this magical freakish political thing in it called DST. So Sunday morning I woke up "just before the alarm would have rung" -- except an hour earlier. That continued for two more nights. It did not matter how exhausted I was, my eyes would spring open and no amount of tossing or turning would get me back to sleep. I feared the worst: I would be an hour off for the next four months, unable to sync up with the rest of the world, perpetually tired.

Yesterday was better: a mere 45 minutes early. Today was even better at just 30 minutes. So I'm slowly converging.

Knowing how the universe works, I'll be back to my normal paranormal self just in time for the next DST change. And then the ability will disappear, as my body remains convinced that I should not wake up until just before an hour after the alarm is set for. I'd better prepare and move the alarm back slowly in March...

2:00PM - and now, the other side of the mirror

From the article mentioned in my last post, something the passenger said:

Root said Friday she accepts Southwest's apology, "and in the future we just hope that children are not separated from their luggage."

This is something that ticks me off about airlines: there is no promise that your checked luggage will end up on your plane, not be sent to Timbuktu, or that it will ever be found again. The middle issue is my biggest complaint, because federal law states that checked baggage cannot be put onto a plane unless and until the passenger has already boarded the plane. It was, I believe, one of the patriot act style laws, no doubt designed to ward off the non-suicide style of bombers.

Yet time and again, airlines flagrantly violate this law, and are never brought to justice. Most flights I have taken I have been able to see the bags being loaded before they start boarding anyone. And if you go to Minneapolis while your bags go to DC? Normal people are "merely" inconvenienced, but it would be excellent for a terrorist, if they had an inside person handling the routing. I have complete faith in our government being able to hire low-wage workers who would not be tempted, given the lack of stories of things disappearing from luggage which now cannot even be minimally secured by their owners.

Oh, but wait, it might not be completely illegal any more, according to HR-2200. Goodie. That is often the way we seem to run this country, though: create overarching laws in moments of tension, then punch holes in them now and then, until the sieve has become a series of useless motions.

Sorry. It's DST transition day here, my least favourite biannual holiday. I'll probably have to learn how to hack a fourth phone system just to get the display right at work tomorrow.

2:00PM - airplane disturbances

Some of you may have heard of the woman with the kid who were kicked off a flight from Texas this week because the two year old was screaming uncontrollably. Perhaps it only made local news since it was a local(ish) person, who may have tipped off the media. The screaming wasn't a cabin pressure thing, as they were still taxiing down towards the runway (the common reason given in comments I've seen excusing the woman). But Southwest gave in and apologized, with extra money tossed in. This really upsets me.

I understand the position of the woman -- sorry, I can't call her a mother since I see little evidence of parenting -- and do think the airline should have reimbursed the cost of the ticket because services were not rendered. I also understand Southwest caving in to avoid the "oh my, as a parent I'll never fly Southwest again!" scare. And I know that some of you here are parents of small children, and might take this the wrong way. But I loathe the precedent that was set.

When you have small children, your options are indeed limited. Still, two years seems like ample time to train and to learn where and when they could be in public, given that probably half of their lives have been spent with parents around. Such a public outburst would not have been acceptable from me or close relatives, nor would we have been dragged into situations before being prepared (except in case of emergency).

Parents make sacrifices for their children in terms of money, time, training, and, yes, destinations. At the tender age of seven I was disappointed at having to go to those kiddy pizza places just because some of my relatives were younger and would run around, but in retrospect those kids had no place in normal restaurants yet. I fear that today there is a sense that everyone has the right to fly or dine well or stay in expensive hotels, no matter how their kids act. No matter whether they are inconveniencing tens or hundreds of others due to the disturbance. No matter whether they are even trying to control their offspring.

Parenting is a responsibility. The screeching kid gets the grease (mmm.. deep fried squealers...), sadly. There are a lot of good parents out there, but there are an increasing number of people who just have kids so they can carry them around like screaming trophies and ignore them while everyone else suffers. Had I been on that plane, I probably would have formed an opinion about exactly when life begins, and it would have been many more trimesters after conception than is considered conscionable by anyone else.

8:00AM - SF bay area so screwed

This would be an excellent time not to be living in the east bay and working in SF (or vice versa).

There were problems with the bypass installation that was done so they can rebuild the bridge which kept the Bay Bridge closed a little bit longer, a month or so ago. Apparently the repairs shifted some of the stress points, and during the high winds last night, one of the cables they installed snapped, smashing several cars. So they have closed the bridge "indefinitely" until repairs and more careful inspections are performed.

Oy. Think I'll be working from home or taking time off for the rest of the week. The subway wasn't too bad this morning, probably because I ran out the door to beat the people who hadn't learned about it yet. It won't be the same tomorrow.

And in something more exciting to people not living here, here's an article about two-phase commits and Starbucks [PDF].

5:00PM - sweet, sweet technology

Oh, yes. Oracle XML functions? You will be mine. It may have taken three days to discover .extract('*') and the XMLAgg(XMLElement()) construct needed around my XMLForest(), and the .getClobVal() to get a larger dataset back (stupid documentation suggests .getStringVal() everywhere), but I'm getting there. Pretty soon I will be creating XML reports from you.

You shall submit! All your XML are belong to us.

6:00AM - annoying jingles

Bleah. I have another song stuck in my head. Well, I always have a soundtrack playing in my head, but usually the songs are decent. This one, although I cannot recall any lyrics, has a cadence and repetition and pitch that suggests one of those modern Christian sing-along songs. On reflection it is probably something like "coming home to Jesus".

Must.. go.. scrub brain. There is some great Christian-oriented music, but pretty much anything from the last century (perhaps two centuries) is horrible. If you can think of it as a jingle it is not worthy.

6:00AM - faux serendipity

So I was searching for something rather esoteric, and one of the top matches was an LJ journal. Curious, I followed the link. Nicely laid out scheme (although a bit peach-coloured for my taste), and an interesting variety of content. Skimming the first two pages and the likes and dislikes, it was clearly a programmer who liked Glen Cook. Even the post about how the next Doctor Who season was actually going to start out with the ninth episode that was filmed and that it was okay so long as the season resolution still worked out was nifty. This was clearly a kindred soul!

And as I went to look to see if we had mutual friends (why hadn't I bumped into this guy before?), I had to wake up for a call of nature.

Because of course it was too good to be true. My dreams are certainly becoming more surreal.

But if you're online searching on an uncommon proper noun or adjectival phrase, where the first word has nine letters and the second seven, probably starting with R and T, and you unexpectedly see such a journal, please tell me. Just in case.

5:00PM - phone update

Okay, the cat is not only out of the bag, but with a little bit of jabbing it makes mewling noises, so it must have gotten in on the winning side of the wave function collapse. Good for it.

My phone choice was the Palm Pre, which goes against all the votes in my poll. But my reasoning is sound, and aside from the two day battery lifetime, I'm quite happy with it. Basically my choice boiled down to: it just works for me.

The iPhone? I see people playing with theirs all the time, and have tried it a few times, but it did not feel quite right. Something was not clicking. The G1? I know someone who is a diva with his, who can surf the web as quickly as I can at a regular computer. But when first handed one, it took me less than ten seconds to touch something that looked interesting and crash and lock it. The G2 (erm, myTouch) was much the same. But the Pre? I just started typing and it started to ask me "oh, do you want to google or wiki this?". That's what I want from a smart phone. Within seconds I was able to use it.

I did get to try quite a few phones: almost a dozen, since someone at work deals with mobile apps and gets sample phones. Some of them, like the HTC Hero, looked promising, but the Pre still felt right to me.

Sprint phone support, though, as briefly mentioned, is kind of like walking into a dental office to ask for directions only to be strapped down to a chair so an assistant can practice root canals with no anesthetic while the dentist goes out in the street to gather people to come in and rape you. Really. Even though I had found The One, I was emotionally so close to telling them where to shove their phone on three separate occasions, and that was before even getting the phone! I highly recommend stabbing yourself rather than calling them.

Still: it is a wicked phone. All I need to do is install the virtual keyboard and hack it to.. uhm, do other things, and I'm good to go.

5:00PM - new useless terminology

Half a year ago, managers at work started talking about ecosystems. I thought it was bizarre that a software division would have much to do with saving the environment, but whatever. The way they used the term made no sense to me. Asking around, I got the impression that it has something to do with the software development lifecycle, or server farms, or.. well, really, I have no idea what it is. It gets mentioned in just about every meeting these days, which leads me to believe it has no meaning.

So when looking at an independent package installer for the Pre, I was horrified to see the term "homebrew ecosystem".

Sounds kind of like a compost heap, doesn't it?

10:00PM - a tale of two customer support encounters

Sprint: even though it will displease 28bytes and some others, I have to say FAIL. Wow. I love my new phone (and yes, I owe everyone a post about that (and yes, it's the Pre, which of course nobody voted for (and yes, I'm parenthesizing way too much (and no, "and yes" is not the new "cdr" or "car")))), but Sprint customer support is horrible. It took over an hour just to get them to allow Amazon to ship my phone. Two more hours to transfer a phone number, since they just sort of assigned one to me. I think based on the two bills I received, each for $200, that they not only started charging me before I got the phone, but they are loopy in many other ways. It would be nice if the people from Hyderabad who answer the calls did not have names like "Jane".

Bleah. Too much vitriol. I'll save some for my scathing comments about deposits. No more about Sprint for now.

Lenovo, though. I bought a Thinkpad X61 a few years ago and it has been excellent. Somewhere between a laptop and a netbook, light enough to carry but powerful enough to use: the experience suggested I might like a Thinkpad for my main entertainment centre machine. So I looked and the SL series seemed the best, since it offered nVidia graphics and HDMI output, while still getting good reviews for being quiet and not a power hog. The laptop arrived. It was refurbished, but looked fine. When I finally got around to turning it on, though, neither the finger joystick nor the touchpad worked.

Seemed like a hardware issue to me. After poking around I found a phone number, collected serial numbers, and phoned in. A nice man from Atlanta talked to me, listened to the problem, walked me through a few steps (which I had been through, and he was willing to trust me when I presented my knowledge, especially since I could navigate most of Vista with no mouse), and offered me the choice of taking it in to a repair shop or just getting a kit in the mail and reading repair instructions online. There were reassurances and a general feeling that I was indeed a valued customer -- even though I had purchased a refurb laptop, which, given the configuration, was a steal.

Night and day. I am generally not brand-loyal (or even brand-conscious), but Lenovo tempts me to break that trend. So I'm putting up a good word for them here.

7:00PM - well, that was slow

Hearing that there was an accident on the Bay Bridge (going into SF), I work left a bit early. Even though I was going away from SF, it seemed like later buses might be delayed while earlier ones would not be. So I arrived at the bus terminal at 5:16 and waited.. and waited.. and at 5:56 the 4:30 bus arrived to let people on.

Probably I should have taken the subway, although they've ticked me off (separate post some day) and the line did not look so long that I thought that three buses had not arrived: I was about twentieth in line. As time went on, people left, and eventually I was tenth. That must be why the line was only quite long rather than insanely long. Ah, well. I'm not good at saying "hey, I've been here half an hour, screw this" because that clearly means the bus will arrive five seconds after I leave. It may be a character flaw, but it's mine.

What was most surprising to me was that my assumption was false. The line I was taking is one-way: it goes into SF in the morning, and out of SF in the evening. I counted on one of two cases. The buses might live in Oakland overnight, go into SF in the morning, stay there, then go back home in the evening: possible but that's a lot of buses sitting around. Or the buses still live in Oakland, but some of them go back empty for a second or third pass. Either way I assumed that the buses would stay in SF during the day rather than needlessly going back to Oakland empty. That's just weird.

Ah, well. Our fancy newish Van Hool buses don't have wifi, which is pretty dumb, and you can't buy tickets at the SF hub, which is ludicrous, so it is quite possible AC Transit is simply run by reasoning-challenged people.

It also makes me question why the Macross Frontier cityship has bridges in them, since those cause gridlo.. oh yeah. Flying mecha. Never mind.

6:00PM - Macross San Francisco

Watching the first few episodes of Macross Frontier, I thought some of the architecture looked quite familiar. Which seemed odd, given that it takes place on a cityship in deep space fifty years from now. Then they showed a shot with a bridge that looked exactly like the Golden Gate bridge. Okay, so they might have modelled it after the San Francisco area.

Later on there was an island that looked like Alcatraz, and a bridge that looked like the Bay Bridge. Fine, so instead of just being like SF, maybe they borrowed quite heavily from the scenery.

And then in episode 10, Ranka looks outside her apartment. I had to rewind and check, but yes, I recognized that exact view: a hill going down towards the bay with a view of the bridge, and a building on the corner with a red and gold seal. Not only that, but there was a street sign labelled "Powel".

I believe -- and I could be off by a block north or south -- that it was from Clay about half a block uphill and west of Powell. I've been there. The city was not just modelled off of San Francisco, but it is San Francisco. Someone on the design team must have spent a lot of time there.

Obviously I will need to hike up into the rezzie part of Chinatown to confirm this (and take a photo).

9:00AM - the horrors!

Apparently there is a new disorder that is sweeping across the nation. Move over, H1N1! Go hide in a corner, Asperger's! Because now there is...

Internet Addiction Disorder

(or, as the news helpfully tells me, "IAD", for those who have problems figuring out how acronyms work)

But wait! There's help. The Center for Internet Addiction, which has been around since 1995 (even though all their pages seem to have been created on the 15th of August of this year), is there to help people recognize the symptoms. And there is a rehab clinic, where for just 45 days of your life and half the price of an SUV you can save yourself by living in a place with no internet access, forced to hike and practice yoga and things like that.

So quick, go online and start twitting all your friends to beg them for donations. It's not cheap taking a seven week vacation and paying for rehab. I mean, what else could you possibly do to get somewhere with no internet? It's not like any airplanes fly into North Dakota, nor are there any small towns within driving distance that have no wifi hotspots. Of course, even if you cure your addiction you should keep reading my stuff, because that doesn't really count. It's just a little bit of internet. It can't hurt.

*sigh*

I understand the need people have to name everything, but this is not something deserving of a name. Otherwise I clearly have BRAD (Book Reading Addiction Disorder), and that would be the pitts.

4:00PM - do the math

Since work was buying lunch (for a meeting) and everyone else was getting lots of extras, I splurged and got one of those small bags of Kettle brand chips. After all, I was eating a salad, and since the salad turned out to be nasty it was a good thing.

Except.. the chips seemed salty. Very salty. Insanely salty.

I checked the front of the bag, where it assured me in bold letters that it was "lightly salted". I glanced at the back of the bag (while people watched me, wondering what my problem was) where the nutritional information reassured me that it was only 13% of the recommended daily allowance. Fine, I thought: maybe I'm just not used to salt anymore.

Being unable to finish the bag I brought it back to my desk. Now that I can look more closely, I see that the 13% of my recommended sodium is.. 430mg? Say what? When did the USRDA of sodium jump to 4g? Oh, wait, it didn't: below the nutritional facts it says that 2-2.5g is recommended, and maybe less depending on what your doctor says. Uhm...

Oh, and the 2oz bag had two servings. Not many people split a tiny bag of chips. Which means I had half my daily allowance in that one bag. It also implies that the chips were about 2% sodium, so about 4% salt. Bleah!

Time for my sixth glass of water for the afternoon.

10:00AM - that Nobel peace prize thingy

I was pretty surprised Obama was chosen. I'm not sure who I would have voted for to get it, because about 99% of the news is about scandals or deaths or crimes or wars rather than about people who are out making the world a nicer place, but I would assume there were some other possible choices.

That said, wow, he has great speech writers and makes a great presentation. His morning press conference where he said he was accepting it was well worth listening to. Basically: he doesn't feel he is worthy of the great company, sees it more as an award the entire country got, and is accepting it because it is a symbol of what America should do in coming years. That guy's got rhetoric. (his icebreaking joke at the beginning was a bit weak, but, eh)

3:00PM - to make it an even better day

Change request that was just fulfilled (by someone else):

EU web site: replace "a, b, and c" by "a, b and c"
Details: for France and Germany, "and" is never preceded by a comma

*sigh*

I know I'm a radical syntactic prescriptivist and that a lot of my personal choices for how I write infuriate people, but that just means I have the right to be angry when they pull stunts like this. Even foreign countries cannot escape my ire, unless they can justify their decisions.

9:00AM - that was nasty

Never before have I opened a new carton of soy milk that has a month left on its expiration date to find it had curdled into something like buttermilk. It seemed a little thick when I poured it onto my cereal, but I assumed I had just shaken it really well and it had lots of little bubbles. It took a second bite before I determined that yes, it was indeed bad.

Eeew. *sigh*

10:00AM - car encounters of the strange kind

The driver for my carpool today was relatively new to carpooling, and was chatty. We all got to discuss what we did for a living, whether we liked it or not, and so on. Eh, I've had worse conversations.

When we got out of the car, the guy who had been in the front seat waited up for me. He then asked for my name, and wondered what languages I programmed in. He chatted about being interested in learning, how he was working on a web site, didn't think he was great yet, and so on. At the end he gave me his card and asked me to email him so we could chat about programming.

O-kay. I'm not really certain how to handle that. If I email it could turn out painful as he asks question after question; if I don't I might run into him in the carpool line again. Bleah.

(and no, he wasn't flirting with me, since he mentioned having gotten married just last week.. nobody is going to start looking around after just one week)

7:00AM - evolution

Although I really wish charities would never ever email me or waste their money sending physical mail (to date the EFF is the only group that seems to respect this), this notice was interesting:

I thought that you might like to know that Richard Dawkins will be discussing his new book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (Free Press, 2009) in the Bay Area twice in October.
[...]
At 7:30 on October 7, he will be speaking to Berkeley Arts & Letters at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, [...]

I think it's awesome that a pro-evolution discussion is taking place inside a Christian church.

3:00PM - how rich is too rich?

The new Freddie Mac CFO could make up to $5.5M this year. Various other sources either attack or defend this as being reasonable.

I have great difficulty imagining any person being worth that much, whether this is "market value" or not. I have some difficulty imagining that any person is worth more than $100K/yr. It's easy to live off of that much, and comfortably. Sure, you might not always have this year's new Lexus and a new Armani suit every month, but those seem like worthless things to me.

Way back when I calculated how much I would want to have accumulated before retiring -- where by "retiring" I mean "taking a really low-stress job that covers health insurance". $2M seemed like a nice figure (read: unreasonable goal but it would be cool). Invested wisely in stocks, adjusted for inflation and cost of living, and accounting for taxes, it would yield almost $90K/yr just from interest, leaving the principal untouched. I am, of course, nowhere near that figure, and that's an extravagant sum for retired life, but with this guy's job? Six months will set him up for life. That doesn't seem right.