The Book of Merle

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.

7:00PM - honesty in advertising

One of the sponsors for one of my local news stations is Bank of the West. As such, they get to run a quick blurb-ad in the ticker every now and then. Their chosen motto? "The kind of bank that doesn't charge for free checking."

Whoa, get back! Such glowing propaganda! Well, I simply must invest my money with them. Imagine, not charging for a free service.

I'll have to remember this awe-inspiring turn of phrase for when I am asked to give a recommendation for someone I have worked with whom I truly detest. "She came into the office frequently during business days." "He used the computer on his desk now and then." It has such potential.

9:00AM - oh, is that how you are supposed to use it?

I get to hear a lot of radio commercials on my carpool ride into work each morning. Today's winning advertisement was for some energy drink or other. Someone was asking a woman why she was so perky and energetic, and she gave all the credit to the energy drink. Cheerfully she exclaimed "and the glucosamine keeps me flexible and lubricated!".

*cough*

My mind isn't all that dirty; I try to brush it off every couple of days. But really.

12:00PM - state quarters

I know, state quarters are so last year. But I still haven't caught them all, so need to check my change every now and then. Apparently they moved into territory quarters this year, but I have yet to have seen a single one. That seems to be the trend with specialty currency out here: they can make whatever they want, but I will never see it. I still have yet to see a presidential dollar coin. With my luck, the first one I will see will be of Emperor Bush ][ and I'll hurl it in disgust at the nearest homeless person's cup.

What disappoints me about the territory quarters is that I haven't even heard of some of these places. Northern Mariana Islands?^* Where the heck are those? And why do we own them? What are we, some sort of colonial-era empire?

Since we're so far in debt, maybe we should sell them off. I'm sure some emir from Dubai would give us a few billion for them. After all, California has been selling off land that housed public schools or parks to patch up its budget.^**

There is one state quarter that I really want. Wiki points to a die strike problem which caused some number of Kansas state quarters to say "IN GOD WE RUST". I'd love to have one of those coins...

^*Now, if we owned the Northern Marinara Islands, I'd be down with that.
^**Note that I am strongly against this: selling land off to pay immediate bets is a raw deal. Ten years from now they'll discover "oops, we need more schools!" and be up the creek without a paddle.^*** Still, the thought of the "Bastion Of Democracy" having colonial territories feels wrong.
^***Why is the phrase "up the creek without a paddle"? If you're up the creek you can just drift down to where you started; it's only when you are downstream that it becomes a huge problem.

8:00AM - air circulation

A question for those of you who drive: do you have the air blowers on most of the time, or leave them off?

I pretty much leave them on. If underdressed or it is wicked cold outside I'll turn them off until the engine warms up enough to provide heat, but otherwise I like the flow of air. Windows are of course an option, but it also defeats the sound baffling, so I mostly only use them when the car has become hot from sitting out in the sun for too long. Except during scenic drives where the air is especially pleasant.

Riding in the casual carpool each morning, I find something like three quarters of the drivers leave the blowers off. Some of them will have their windows open until we get on the highway, but most do not. The ride ends up being twenty minutes of just sitting there in stale air.

Maybe it is just me, but I like airflow. It doesn't have to blow directly on me: there are vent controls to point the air. It doesn't need to be climate-controlled, any more than what you get by deciding whether to get outside air as-is or run it through a pipe near the engine (which I assume is how the heating works), but I do want fresh air. I can't imagine that the blowers require much energy or in any way alter the aerodynamics of the car, so why turn them off?

9:00AM - another magical date

Today is another of those mystical dateless days where the phone on my desk just reads "Wednesday September ..." because it ran a few pixels short of being able to display the date.

Good thing I don't, say, look at the phone every morning so I can flip to the right page on my desk calendar. *sigh*

7:00PM - good times

I had the chance to meet oxymoronia today and walk San Francisco. And by "walk San Francisco", I really mean it. We went up part of Telegraph Hill, up Russian Hill (which meant after going uphill for many blocks we then walked up that "curviest street in the world" section of Lombard), and up and down two or three hills deemed too wussy to have names because they didn't have 85° inclines. We pretty much went through everything north of Market and east of the Presidio.

And it was loads of fun. Great company, and I got to see sections of the city that I only vaguely knew existed. It was clear early on that I was a poor tour guide; I could point out the bridge and Coit Tower, but when it came to questions like "is there food near here?" or "where are we?", I only had the vaguest of geographical senses and had to shrug. Still, we saw touristy areas, abandoned wharfs, hills, insanely wealthy neighbourhoods (really, I think those houses cost over $10M each, and it was so completely silent I thought if I shuffled my feet or stared at the architecture that they would call the cops), a couple ethnic restaurant sections I never knew existed, and a few more hills. We also passed by at least five restaurants I'd seen on our local "Check, Please!" restaurant review program.

According to online maps it looks like we walked about eight miles (plus at least a mile vertically)! Had you asked me if I could walk that far I would have said no, because I usually walk just 2-3 miles in a day, and that mostly in flat areas. I guess I really can walk tolerable distances. It would be nice to be able to broaden my range of restaurants (although the nice strip of Thai/Indonesian places is two miles away, which is a bit far for lunch on a work day).

But for tomorrow, I'm not going to walk too much. Just in case.

4:00PM - other freakish weather

Apparently the dense, low cloud that seemed so interesting to me yesterday was only the first in a series of anomalies. Thunder woke me up in the middle of the night, and dry lightning and hail seem to be hitting other parts of the SF bay area.

All I can say is that if I hear horses outside, I'm going to hide in ambush and try to wrest one of them from their saddle and take their place. I'm hoping for War. Death seems too hard to take on, and the other two seem like wusses I would not bother to impersonate. Besides, War would understand.

7:00AM - that was so cool

There is a standard phrase like "the fog rolled in off the ocean", or where I live, "off the bay". It never made sense to me. You wake up in the morning, and if fortune is smiling on you, fog is just sort of there, meaning the day will be nice and cool and moist until the stupid sun ruins it. The motion of fog is hard to discern if you are within it or relatively near it (or if it only sneaks up on you during the night).

On the bus ride home last night, I got to see it happen. Looking out the window I could see Alcatraz, and behind it there was.. for lack of a better word, this big thick cloud sitting right on top of the ocean. Behind that were the north bay hills. As we slowly moved across the bridge, this cloud thing started to envelop Alcatraz, and it was visibly moving towards the shore, since taller sections of the cloud that had been further offshore started to obscure the hills behind them.

It was completely awesome. I wish I had been able to record it. As it was, my intense staring and moving back and forth to watch it was enough to get a few other passengers to look over at it for a bit, just to see what had so enraptured me.

One of these days, perhaps I will live by a shore where this is a frequent occurrence. Then I'll stand out on my lawn in the evening, watch the fog roll in, shake my fist at the sky, and defiantly scream "yeah, take that, sun!". And then my neighbours will eventually call the men with the white coats, but it will have been worth it.

11:00AM - new sporting events

I've seen people racing on crutches before. But I wonder if anyone has ever raced on crutches while wearing roller skates? It would be kind of an urban skiing thing.

Of course, nobody in their right mind would participate or dare to host such an event. The only way it would come to pass would be if a hospital needed more patients so they could get insurance money, and they set up a dummy corporation to sponsor the race. Alas.

9:32AM - phone question

We have a lot of sample phones at work, and I've narrowed down my preference for my next phone. In fact, I think I know exactly which one I want, although that from just a few minutes of use. But it makes me wonder what other people think, were they to recommend a phone for me. (not what you would buy, what you would think I should buy)

Poll #1455345 Phone Question
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 10

You would recommend for me:

12:00PM - he didn't have pointy hair, but should have

There was another press conference this morning about the Bay Bridge, to announce that it might actually reopen sooner than tomorrow morning. So at 6:30 the guy who I had been proud of, who steadfastly gave only what he knew to reporters with no speculation, who seemed to be living at the bridge since he was on day and night doing live presentations, got up to the stand. He then thanked the reporters for coming, thanked a bunch of the contracting groups who helped with the bridge, and..

..got to pass off the microphone to his boss's boss's boss or some such. Who, of course, was the one who got to announce that it would open "later this morning". He then proceeded to thank a bunch of groups, and strangely started talking about other construction projects and detours. Then he just started walking away.

There was a huge outroar from the reporters. He blinked, smiled sheepishly, said "oh, I forgot that", and went back to the microphone to say the one important piece of information: that it would reopen in half an hour. That was all anyone cared about, and all he really needed to convey, yet he forgot to mention it.

Such incompetence, all in an attempt to look good on television and trample over the guy who dealt with the press while he was no doubt off on a vacation. It was incredible.

(traffic on the bridge was completely awesome, although I did have to sit in a car with a carpool driver for like fifteen minutes waiting for a third person to appear...)

11:00AM - bay bridge closure

Well, it turns out that when they closed the bridge on Friday to rip down a segment so they could install the last of the "temporary" detour bridge (temporary in quotes because they expect it to be there for three years), they also did an inspection of the new bridge. And found a large crack in one of the support beams. Two inches wide and full of rust. So they will have to replace it before opening the detour bridge, and since the main bridge now has a large section missing, that means there might be no bridge tomorrow.

On the positive side, I am impressed that aside from this one issue they seem to be on schedule. When I rode home Thursday night they had not started on signs, road striping, electrics, or any of those things that seem essential (and not hard to do in advance). On the negative side, the new flaw they found was on a section of the detour bridge that has been there for at least two years, and has not been inspected since then. One might think they could do an inspection oh, say, a week before closing the bridge, discovered that they were going to be screwed, and either fix it or cancel the closure.

It also seems dumb that CalTrans has two other construction projects underway at the two adjacent bridges. This might be the best time of year for construction, and maybe they just came into money, but if you're going to shut down the major artery you don't block off parts of two others.

I do feel respect for the CalTrans spokesperson, though. He has appeared live on the news almost constantly since the crack was discovered. The news, of course, wants to know if the bridge will reopen on time or not, and if not when it will -- and he adamantly refuses to speculate. All he will say is that the part they expected to finish is on time, that they are working around the clock on that and the new problem, and that since this was unexpected it is unknown right now how long it will take. This is not what anyone wants to hear, of course, but after several days of pressure many people would say something like "oh, maybe Tuesday afternoon, but we really can't tell", which would then be blown out of proportion by the media.

In the software industry, just try telling your boss that you have no idea how long something will take. Very few managers will accept that answer, and will instead insist or coax you into giving a guess -- or even worse, they will simply decide how long it will take. It is nice to see someone standing firm against the idea that every project is easily quantized, like building a brick wall.

11:00AM - non-random + non-random != random

My mom sends me magazine and newspaper clippings all the time. That's okay; it makes her happy and fills up my recycling bin. It would be better if she didn't send them individually packaged by priority mail at great expense, but I have no control over that.

One of the recent clippings was from Science News. I used to love that magazine.. back when I was ten. It's probably at the right technical level for her, though. The last article she sent me, entitled "Laser beam, simple math employed to produce random numbers faster", just feels wrong.

The basic concept is that they shine a laser beam at a mirror, bounce it back into the original beam, and create chaotic interference. However, they found that even though the interference was random, it was also periodic:

“The problem,” Rosenbluh says, “is that the randomness repeats itself every round-trip time."

What did they do to fix this?

The team fed this data into a computer program, which performed simple and quick mathematical manipulations, including throwing out some of the bits. These safeguard calculations appeared to eliminate all of the periodicity, resulting in a string of completely random bits, says Rosenbluh.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't buy this. They start with laser interference which they admit is a one time pad (in cryptographic terms) that just repeats over and over. Then they pass it through an algorithm, which one would call a pseudo random number generator. It does not seem plausible that this produces actual random output: just output with a periodicity of such huge magnitude that you are less likely to see the pattern. How could two non-random things produce something random?

But this is Science News. It is possible they got the story wrong and there is something non-deterministic about the PRNG.

2:00PM - the news, and nothing but the news

There is a good reason not to send reporters out to give live reports: not only are most events only exciting for a brief (and unpredictably timed) moment, but most people are not great at extemporizing. They were showing live coverage of the Bay Bridge detour segment being moved into place, and not much was happening. After noting that a lot of people were just standing around, the reporter tried to paint a good face on things by noting that "certain people did functions".

Oh, really. I never would have guessed.

I'm not saying I could do better with a camera in front of me, but live reporting is vastly overrated. So your station got a reporter (or an affiliate reporter) to the scene. Yay? For the Bay Bridge closure they had years to prepare. Live coverage generally means poor scripting. Live coverage of a trial that is done outside the courthouse before the courthouse is even open is just pathetic.

On a separate note, the difference in business news reporting between channels is awesome. Yesterday's unemployment statistics sent Fox news into a tailspin, where they dramatically reported about 216,000 jobs being lost in August. The horrors! It was presented as a great tragedy, and the market was expected to do poorly. German DW Journal noted that since this was a vastly smaller increase than was expected, the markets were going to end higher. Guess which one was correct.

9:00AM - speak of the devil

On Monday I wrote:

"Well, I survived the two blistering record heat days of the weekend. It is now back to lovely 60Fs misty foggy weather. Not only that, but traffic on the Bay Bridge has doubled, which is a sign that summer is officially over. I welcome the early appearance of autumn, even though summer was remarkably mild and pretty much nice here."

One of these days I am going to learn to keep my big fat mouth shut. *shakes fist at summer*

4:00PM - checker

I have to say that one of my favourite photoshopped images is still from a Fark photoshop contest for "rejected board games". Most of the images were on temporary servers and are gone now, but this one remains.

So I present unto you the board game Checker.

10:00AM - summer and chain restaurants

Well, I survived the two blistering record heat days of the weekend. It is now back to lovely 60Fs misty foggy weather. Not only that, but traffic on the Bay Bridge has doubled, which is a sign that summer is officially over. I welcome the early appearance of autumn, even though summer was remarkably mild and pretty much nice here.

Those of you who have discussed food with me probably know of my general disdain for fast food and chain restaurants. Most of the time I will eat fast food only when necessary, like when stopping for a quick bite on a road trip, and prefer to try some random place than go to a chain. However, I will say one great thing about the two: no matter where in the country you are, they have air conditioning. Chili's probably saved my life on Saturday as a refuge from the heat. Chains and fast food places also tend to put a ton of ice in their drinks, and although they do that to save money, it was quite welcome.

I will still complain about going to a new town, asking what good local food they have, and being pointed to a chain restaurant. But I will not complain that the chains exist, for they do have uses.

1:00PM - for a few dollars more

For a few years now I've been doing online technical surveys where they pay you to sit through questions about what you like or don't like about products, what features you would like, and so forth. It pays next to nothing, but the surveys are all opt-in, so if I have some spare time I fill them out. Most of the time I get kicked out due to demographics (there are lots of tech people where I live), but even when kicked out after four questions you get some (very modest) credit. A check appeared in the mail for my last installment of answers.

It says quite clearly in several areas "For Fifty Dollars" and "**$50.00**", leaving no way to modify the amount. As if anyone would be tricked into not recognizing the change. However, just in case, they have an additional line that says "Not valid over $60 (Sixty Dollars)".

That seems a bit unnecessary to me. Is the company trying to make sure they only have 20% losses and assuming that all forgers are dumb as rocks?

7:00AM - so that's why the banks are suddenly profitable...

Normally I have a xenophobic aversion to salespeople, to the point where even if I know I want something, if they start pushing I start doubting and usually don't buy it. There seems to be a chink in this armour, though: financial institutions can suggest ways for my money to make more money, and somehow that doesn't trigger the default reaction.

Last year I went to the bank to deposit some coins and ditch my savings account, which was making a paltry amount of interest and simply meant I had to keep shuffling money between savings and checking. While there they suggested that I instead move the money into some sort of money market interest bearing checking account.. and I did. Even though this scenario had been played out twice before. Even though both times I regretted it. Even though it still meant a second account and the same amount of juggling.

But it was making 2.25%, which in the middle of last year was a darn good investment. It dropped to 1.5%, then 1%, but to be honest, I usually look at what went in and came out, and interest is just a speck on the radar. I just looked at the latest statement, though. My current interest rate?

0.01%.

Meaning for every $1200 put into the account, I will get a penny per month. A penny. I do not think Franklin would have become famous for saying "$1200 saved is a penny earned".

Of course, going into the bank to ditch that account will cost more than a few pennies of my time, and they'll try some other sales pitch on me. *sigh* Why can't banks treat all accounts the same way? The only difference between accounts is the minimum, the interest rate, and what they choose to name it. I mostly want the bank to be a place my work shoves money into and my expenses suck money out of. (well, I could do without that last part, but that doesn't work out very well)

3:00AM - oh, my

On Thursday weather predictions for Oakland were for just under 70°F and it was 85. Friday, they predicted mid-70s and it was.. 95! No wonder it felt like death even at 10pm.

For today they are predicting 80.

I really, really hope that they have fixed their model and that this is an accurate prediction. If not it will likely be something insane like 105. I do appreciate that this summer has mostly been exceptionally cool to date, but I could have lived with that trend continuing a bit longer.. like, say, until winter.

9:00AM - good advice

As I was walking to work, a guy in a business suit who was walking towards me (and looking at me) loudly proclaimed: "Thank you, that's really great advice. Now can I speak with my wife again?".

I have to assume he was one of those bluetooth cyberpeople, but his ear thingy wasn't visible, and he was staring at me. I was tempted to cry out "no!". After he passed, I realized I should have said "I'm sorry, but she said any conversations should go through her divorce lawyer". It probably would not have been feasible to get that all out before he passed by, though. Alas.

9:00AM - let the restrictions commence!

Apparently there's a new(ish) method of making meth that requires less sudafed and can be made in a two liter soda bottle. No more meth labs to raid; you can make your own as you need it.

I can't wait to see if they decide to restrict the distribution of soda in two liter bottles. "Excuse me, ma'am, you can only buy two of those at a time." Then again.. taking away cold medication means the people who complain are generally feeling too ill to complain much. Taking away the primary beverages in this country could cause a revolution.