The Book of Merle

9:00AM - oh frabjuous day

Ah, an excellent summer day. Cloudy, slightly breezy, with some fog, highs in the 60Fs.. bliss. I could deal with having this sort of weather every summer day.

And fall, and winter, and spring. I doubt the ecosystem would like that, though. Occasional drizzle, denser fog, high winds, and very occasional thunderstorms would be nice variants to have, but I should not look a gift day in the mouth.

Also, while walking in to work I noticed that the nearest Starbucks is closed and boarded up. I did not know they could close! What a great day.

Of course it will be offset with an afternoon full of back-to-back meetings and the knowledge of the upcoming BART strike, but still, a nice start. (plus none of the light-lovers have come in to turn on the office lights so it is pleasantly dark in here)

6:00PM - syfy

I am never quite certain whether to feel great disdain or great sorrow for the average marketing person. Imagine the countless meetings, drafts, and proposals that came out for the glorious renaming of the SciFi channel to Syfy, and how much effort was put into their new motto. A motto they trot out several times a minute, plastering it over the top of the running show and playing commercials during breaks advertising themselves.

A motto that tells us to "imagine greater".

It works. Every time I see their logo and their new corporate motto, I can indeed imagine something greater than what I am seeing. So sad.

(it probably did not help matters that I first started seeing the change during the highly uninspired "Warehouse 13" pilot)

11:00AM - riddle me this

My love-hate relationships with crossword puzzles continues. I enjoy them in general, but the harder ones usually have clues I know I would never get even given four out of five of the letters, and those are not fun at all. Worse, though, are the ones that anger me.

Five letters: "warmer and sunnier". Clearly the answer should have been "nasty" or something indicating true evil, but I knew that would not be the case. All of the intersecting clues were useless things like "Hungarian lacrosse great Eco" or "1917 Bolivian actor", so there was nothing to build upon. When I was done with the puzzle I went to look at the answers for the few clues I wondered about, and discovered the answer: "nicer".

I've read Lakoff, I understand the societal judgments that up is better than down, white is better than black, and right is better than left. Warmer being better than colder still gets me worked up. Were I a conspiracy theorist I would blame it on Exxon and the other oil giants: what they are doing is clearly good because global warming will make it warmer, so we should be thanking them!

Pesky crosswords.

8:00AM - more bing/google numbers

[java]: 240M (bing), 357M (google)
[java string startsWith]: 4.2M, 356K
[laptop hdmi]: 126K, 9.2M
[laptop hdmi vga dvi]: 112K, 2.5M
[carnelian]: 941K, 2M
[carnelian finger]: 280K, 44K
[wayne gretsky] (deliberate misspelling): 2.3M, 1.3M
[bing vs google]: 715K, 29M

They're all just numbers, of course. More specific queries do not always favour one search engine over the other, although in general Bing seems to throw out fewer partial matches.

The most amusing part was searching on my given name, in quotes. Bing offers over eight hundred times as many matches! When that recruiter from Google calls back I will clearly have to mention this...

10:00AM - the great search engine robbery

Bing versus Google came up at work. Simple searching revealed the results.

Searching on google for [bing]: 58M matches. [google]: 2390M matches.
Searching on bing for [bing]: 5.8M matches. [google]: 172M matches.

Sure, it is too early in the game for an accurate prediction, but currently? I know which one I am going to use. And it is not the one with the funky CSS2 backdrops.

9:00AM - Palin: the mystery solved

All the pundits are running around throwing theories left and right about why Palin is resigning. If they just stopped to think about it, the answer is obvious:

• She has said that she can see Russia out her window.
• Obama is meeting with Putin in Russia.

She just wanted to sit at home and get a front row seat! Probably they wouldn't let her take the day off, so she quit her job.

Silly pundits, kicks are for trids!

8:00PM - the good and the bad, and both were wrong

Although correct that the shared balcony was cleaned for a party, and although my later guess was accurate that it was for the people with the freakish kid who runs around the balcony doing weird stuff loudly, filling flower pots six inches deep with water, and breaking things, it actually turned out nicely. They dragged a table over to a corner and had a quiet dinner. Either having his parents around generated good behaviour or the grandmother in attendance cast a most excellent blessing of silence over him. The only time I was worried was when they let him run around (silently) waving sparklers, because if anyone could set fire to concrete it would be that kid. All in all, a nice and unexpected experience. Good, but I was wrong.

Elsewhere I predicted the DOW would rise 2% today. It was obvious! 4% drop Thursday, no possible action Friday, clearly investors would be snatching up prime deals. But no, it only went up .5%. Fail. I was confident enough I would have ranked it at 90% likely. Wrong again. At least it was up a bit, though, so no loss there.

So the last few days have been full of wrong on my part, but in neither case did it turn poorly. Except where my ego is concerned.

7:00PM - dubious ways to stimulate the economy

Because it has been a nice chilly summer out here, a lot of the beachfront towns have been hurting due to lack of traffic. A news story mentioned that this weekend they were hoping to recoup a lot of their losses, because the holiday fell on a weekend (more likely it is the three day weekend, which for fixed-date holidays happens 4/7ths of the time, but whatever). They interviewed a woman with two small kids who was down there spending money.

She listed off $15 for parking, $20 for candy (!!!?), and $60 for "a mediocre lunch". Even at the poshest of beachfront towns I can't imagine $60 for lunch for a parent and two kids, especially after all that candy, but she continued to shock me by proudly saying:

"I'm a consumer. I created new consumers. I'm breeding new consumers. It's my job, that's what I do to help."

...

6:00PM - a clean balcony

The landlord came out and vacuumed and swept the huge shared balcony outside my apartment windows. He vacuumed for more than an hour and a half. I am not sure how it took that long.

You would think this was a good thing. Indeed, when I moved in the balcony was cleaned every month. But health took its toll, and it happens at most once a year these days.

The thing is, the only time it happens now is when someone tells the landlord that they are going to have a huge barbecue party out there. All of my windows face out onto it, which means I have to close them as soon as the lighter fluid comes out, and sit inside baking and listening to raucous people outside for hours.

Well. Or I could go somewhere. But the thing about people holding parties is that they tend to be on holidays when basically everything is closed. The only places I can think of that will be open tomorrow are parks (which will be full of groups of people setting off fireworks illegally and drinking in public) and movie theatres (which I have practically sworn off because they are so insanely loud inside).

Ah well. It doesn't happen often, and it should be cool tomorrow. As a bonus, assuming the party throwers clean up (something that occasionally happens) the balcony will be nice and clean.

8:00PM - ¿qué tal?

Today I finished lesson 30 (the final one) of Pimsleur Spanish level 1. Towards the end especially my retention was very poor, and when asked to say something I flailed for seconds on simple words, but overall there was probably 10-20% retention of information. Since I never did follow up with written sources that seems tolerable. Also, learning a language while on a bus watching for your stop, in very short intervals with no direct interaction with others, is not the easiest way to learn a language, so again they did pretty well.

The thing is, I morally bought into the "try before you buy" model. I now must purchase it. It is not cheap, nor do I particularly wish to own it in CD form (16 CDs for what could have fit on one if they used MP3s?). But it must be done.

Perhaps I will purchase a copy for a library or a school. That would satisfy my requirements of paying for services rendered. Quite honestly, it costs less than a semester would have at a community college and was significantly more convenient, so it is a bargain (although if I had had to pay for it before using it I would not have used it). It is just hard to suddenly discover a large expense like that.

4:00AM - a new book series

So while I was off at a training seminar for work I met someone. We hit it off fairly well, and he recommended a series of books. Being horrible with names all I can say is that the name of the series started with a P (possibly Par-), was eight letters long, and was not a compound noun. The author was male with a 4-5 letter first name starting with a consonant and a longer last name.

Anyway, I read the latest book in the series, and it was good. Not great, but sufficiently interesting, and with thirteen books it would guarantee me a few weeks' worth of reading. Reviews suggested the fourth book was the best, although (of course) Amazon was out of all of the books since they were a bit old. Still, I knew I would recognize them at a bookstore. The covers uniformally showed the face and torso of a main character, usually in brightly coloured clothing, and for reasons unknown to me the faces never had noses or mouths.

I thought well enough of the series that I praisingly posted about it here. In fact, I was tempted to tell the person about my journal, which is something I never do: if work people stumble across it (which is so unlikely only one person ever has) then they have proven themselves tricky enough to be worthy, but I don't volunteer such information. Still, it was under consideration.

And then I woke up.

ARGH. Stupid, vile prat of a brain! Making up an entire scenario, all the way down to "remembering" things about the books that match how I tend to remember things. It was a good series! I want it! Gah.

9:00AM - the death of a legend

Arrr(gh)! Apparently the Pirate Bay is no more.

Well, not quite. But they are being bought by another firm that is interested in expanding it and making it more "legal". Uh huh. Can you say "Napster"? I don't know, it just feels kind of like your ultra-powerful superhero friend suddenly decided that he couldn't use his powers against anything with a colour. Pretty soon you stop calling him and the Wonder Twins move up a slot on your speed dial.

Rest in pieces of eight, my fine source. You will be missed.

12:00PM - is I is or is I ain't?

The verdict is out: apparently I am cynical.

I know, what a shock! But at work last week I mentioned that some new development might not be all that bad, and someone asked if I knew the tale of the frog and the scorpion. Of course I did: it is practically mandatory reading when you are three years old.

After indicating that I knew the story, I suggested that the moral was obvious: be the scorpion.

Was that cynical? You could be the frog, and have the choice between being a jerk and not offering a ride, or being the sucker and dying. Or you could be the scorpion and be in control of the situation. It felt like the obvious choice.

Alas, now I shall never make it to frog heaven. No eternity of leaping around on delicate plants or swimming through pond scum. *sigh*

6:00AM - saw that one coming from a kilometer away

Standard annual reminder to self: do not taunt the summer. It will come and make your apartment into an oven. On the plus side, cooking eggs merely means taking them out of the fridge and setting them on plates.

Okay. It really is not that bad. Mid 80Fs. I just do not do well with heat.

On the amusing side, all the regulars were off yesterday on my local indie news station. Their standard news pattern, which is to alternate between weather teasers and full weather reports, was maintained. The teaser suggested extreme heat. The full report then said it would be windy and cool. Huh?

In fact, the full report looked remarkably familiar. It should have been: instead of the weather report for this Saturday they were showing the clip from last Saturday! The one person who was covering the three hour segment had to get up and try to do the weather sections live. Some phone calls must have been made, because an hour later a weather person showed up, bleary-eyed with hair pulled back in a pony tail and makeup poorly applied, to handle the weather. (she also came up with different highs than the screen or the ticker showed, alas)

8:00AM - the all-important Erdös number

Via XKCD.

Bwa ha ha!

*cough* You possibly have to have been a mathematician to appreciate it.

In news of even less interest to anyone, after a few hard crashes my Mini no longer lets me program the flange buttons on my trackball to do double-clicks. Instead, I can only get the completely useless double-right-click. Very irritating. Having a single button do a double-click is quite nice for my wrists.

10:00AM - what's in a name?

A quote from an article from yesterday afternoon about apparently the only thing that happened in the entire world yesterday:

"Michael is survived by three children: Michael Joseph Jackson, Jr., Paris Michael Katherine Jackson and Prince "Blanket" Michael Jackson II."

Uhm. Really? Not to speak ill of the dead (okay, actually I have no compunctions against that), but I'm not sure that having been given names like those counts as "surviving". Talk about unwieldly.

9:00AM - the downpour of justice

One of the sidewalks on my walk into work is about fifteen feet wide, allowing for a lot of pedestrians. During the early morning hours in the summer, though, it is relatively empty. So I was surprised to see a woman walking towards me who was practically hugging the wall on the left. There was plenty of room, but apparently she really needed the comfort of the concrete and faux-granite.

So much so that she deliberately walked through a coned-off section that had danger signs on it about people working above. It would have been a three foot detour to do the right thing, but she wanted to be next to that wall.

When she was directly across from me I heard a noise. Glancing over, I saw a big splash of dirty window washer water come down and drench her. After a little shriek she started wiping the water off while continuing down her dangerous path next to the wall.

It was difficult not to smirk. I lie slightly; having already passed her, full smirk-mode was engaged.

In retrospect, it felt like a Mastercard commercial. "Business dress: $200. Hair stylist: $120. The waterfall of Damocles: priceless."

9:00AM - "clear!" *thwuump*

Once upon a time, Americans were scared and frightened. Just open your door and there may be a suicide bomber standing there waiting to toss a bomb at you! So airport security became draconian and insanely stupid, and travellers hated it.

Along came a private company with an offer. For just a few hundred dollars, an invasive investigation into you and your family, your aunt's bank account tracking number, and your cousin's social security number, you could sign up for a magic "Clear" card. At the airport you could then skip ahead of all the peons and you would not even have to remove your shoes or coat, because mere possession of this card proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that you were a Good Person. (I suppose it also shows that you are Wealthy since you can toss money out the window, but that's not relevant here)

I always thought this was stupid for two reasons. One was for the consumer: the sheer amount of information you had to give to a private company, and the fact that you were paying them a huge annual fee, made it seem not worth it for most people -- certainly not for the 250,000 people who signed up. The other was for the airport: why trust what this company says? I can steal one card just as easily as another, and even biometrics are not to be trusted. As a terrorist I just slip some C4 into the coat of some Clear person and remove it again once past security. Fools.

Overnight, with no warning to employees or customers, the company declared bankruptcy. The card readers are gated off, employees got zero notice, and customers who tried to cut to the front simmered in frustration as they had to go back to being a lowly peon.

Oops.

8:00PM - summertime

It must be summer in these parts.

You might think the solstice yesterday tipped me off, but actually I knew it two weeks ago. All of a sudden there was practically nobody on the freeways and bridges. (note that given where I live "practically nobody" means you are still bumper-to-bumper but aside from occasional stops you can drive at a tolerable clip) I have no clue where everyone disappears to in the summer. Perhaps they are just feigning an enjoyment of hot weather, stole a page from my book, and trekked off to the north pole? San Francisco seems like a touristy sort of destination; why aren't they there? But I shan't complain; it is nice to have ten minutes shaved off of my daily commute in each direction.

Besides, the weather here has been phenomenal for the last three weeks. Cool, breezy, often at least slightly overcast.. sheer bliss. It cannot last, but when the weather people on TV say "lower than average for this time of year" and "morning fog", it is music to my ears.

(Correction: the solstice occurred around when I wrote this, not the day before. Bad me! But as a programmer I'm allowed to be off by one...)

10:00AM - album finally available

Just on a lark I checked Amazon for the Rogue Traders album I mentioned earlier. Lo and behold, they have a very limited supply!

I can get one copy for $22.. or what appears to be an identical copy for $52.

Decisions, decisions...

6:00PM - Iran

Everyone has probably followed the elections, riots, and what not in Iran more closely than I have, so I won't comment on it directly. I will mention something I thought was strange, though.

Iranians who live in the SF bay area were allowed to go to Emeryville (one of our central burbs) and cast votes for the election. Paper ballots. On the day of the election.

Is that normal, that a country would allow people to vote by paper ballot in another country, when the votes are also being tabulated in that other country? That just screams loss of control, fraud, and the possibility of a hostile takeover.

Oh, but wait, that's right. The US is the Bastion of Purest Democracy. Why, we have never had problems with fraud or disputed vote counts. Especially not ones where the count turns out different on every recount.

5:00PM - learning is for losers!

Ah, Pimsleur, you do make me laugh. A conversation fragment from tonight's Spanish lesson:

"No, don't go right, (word we haven't learned) straight."
"What does that word mean?"
"Never mind." (literally "it's not important" in Spanish)
"But I want to learn Spanish."
"Never mind. You're coming with me."

8:00AM - jukebox downtime

Last week at work I broke out a Rogue Traders album that I had not yet listened to. I made it all the way through the album once, but on the second time through kept rewinding back to the same song over and over. After an hour or so of that I realized that song had me hooked and I may as well give in to the inevitable, so just set up that one song to repeat. All day.

That's not necessarily odd for me to do. My playlists tend to be quite short on any given day. For a new song to make it there after one listening, though, is exceedingly rare. But that wasn't the strange thing.

When I got home, I could not remember the song. Period. Attempts to recall it resulted in tiny clips from other songs that were vaguely similar, but that was all. Not only that, but my internal jukebox that constantly fills my mind with music was.. silent. That never happens.

After a night's sleep, the song was back and all was restored. I don't know what to make of that. It is as if my brain had to defragment the music partition, or perhaps there was a bad sector and it had to move the songs off, reformat, and move them back.

Two more days of only listening to that song and it is embedded in my soul. There are a couple of other songs on the album that I like, too. It's definitely on my "buy the physical media" list. Not that anyone in this part of the world sells it. *shakes fist yet again at "global" economy*

8:00AM - tales of the unexpected, issue 496

Last week I was travelling and did not sleep well. After returning and catching up on the news, I openly mocked a commercial for a sleeping drug because of the vast list of side effects they read off.

Since then I have had trouble sleeping. Not to the point of requiring medication, just to the point where I am constantly about to nod off at inopportune times, but cannot actually lie down and sleep at night.

*sigh*

There is a cosmic report card somewhere with my name on it. In a spot where most people have a gold star and perhaps a few words of praise, it is blank. Next to it, written in crisp, clean penmanship, is the terse statement "does not play well with reality".

4:00PM - sleep well lately?

Try Ambien CR! Their commercial is either creepy, scary, or outrageously funny, depending on how you look at it. The minute long commercial I saw spent three-quarters of the time describing side effects. Rather than transcribing it, I'll just quote from their web site:

When taking either of them, don’t drive or operate machinery. Plan to devote 7 to 8 hours to sleep before being active. Sleepwalking, and eating or driving while not fully awake, with memory loss for the event, as well as abnormal behaviors such as being more outgoing or aggressive than normal, confusion, agitation, and hallucinations may occur. Don’t take it with alcohol as it may increase these behaviors. In patients with depression, worsening of depression, including risk of suicide may occur. If you experience any of these behaviors contact your doctor immediately. Allergic reactions such as shortness of breath, swelling of your tongue or throat, may occur and in rare cases may be fatal.

Gosh! Don't drive.. except that a side effect might include sleep-driving. With aggressive behaviour and memory loss. And hallucinations. "No, occifer, I didn't ram my SUV into the dragon over there, I'm asleep right now. *punch*"

Especially cute was the bit in the commercial where the newly rejuvenated and smiling person walked in and started talking on the phone, because that was right when they started talking about the risk of suicide. I wonder what number she was calling...

There are worse things than not being able to sleep. I'm guessing this Ambien stuff is one of them.

7:00PM - travel

I'm starting to feel a lot more ambivalent towards travel. On the plus side there is seeing new people and places, doing different things, eating new foods, discovering new subcultures.. all of which are most excellent things that everyone should do frequently. Cross-pollination is good. But there are downsides.

For personal vacations, unless going to a B&B for a holiday from normal life, I always feel like I'm not taking full advantage unless I do all that I can do. Plan ahead, have many activities of various sorts (whether all are used or not it is nice to have a menu), and fill every day as best as can be done. After all, will I ever return to that city? Living life to its fullest, though, takes a considerable amount of work. As I ossify, longer trips seem more painful than fun.

For business travel, I cannot see why people enjoy it. Often there is a mandated airline schedule, a mandated hotel, and a really picky per diem (at least at my level). During the visit there is an expectation of more work than one would normally do, most of which consists of sitting in small conference rooms in meeting after meeting after meeting. The introvert in me gets tired of this after an hour or two and is traumatized long before the end of the first day. Sure, the airfare and hotel and (some) food is covered by the company, but the cost is paid by the soul.

The downside of air travel these days is another big one. I used to love flying. It would not matter if it was a short hop or a long flight, it was neat and painless. These days, with the four plastic bins you have to unpack into and repack from, the thirst and starvation and lack of bathrooms, the constant suspicion and identity checks.. it is barely worth it. If I wanted to be treated like a convicted criminal I'd just stab someone: at least that way the state would be picking up the tab.

There are also personal issues, like the way I cannot seem to sleep well in a bed away from home. Familiarity is comforting. If there were a way to teleport back home every night, I'm sure I would feel better about travel. (aside from the fact that if that were possible every bloody fool on the planet would be on vacation at the popular locations, so I wouldn't be able to go to those)

I'm not ready to give up travel. I can't for work or for health. But it has moved from pure pleasure to something that is done, and that's kind of sad.

9:00AM - what would Aesop do?

We've been friends for a fair amount of time, and I own a cardboard box factory that employs quite a few people. However, times have been hard recently. One day I meet you at the country club and note that things aren't going very well, and would you kindly lend me $20K?

Of course, that's a lot of money, so you think about it. Our eventual deal is that I have to get my act together and start to turn a profit, but in return you get some small stake in my company. Noticeable results are part of the deal. We shake on it and things seem fine.

A few months later, we meet up again, and you ask how things are going. It turns out that I owe Guido's Construction Company $180K, and that consumers really aren't buying cardboard boxes any more -- they prefer tubes. I admit to declaring bankruptcy. I assure you that I've been working hard, though, and have A Plan. But between Guido's constant requests for "payments" and the necessary retooling, I'm going to need another $30K. You'll get a majority of the company, although I will still be making all of the business decisions. And rest assured! My plan is a good one, and although $30K does not look like much compared to $180K I promise it will be enough to turn things around.

Poll #1409283 only off by six orders of magnitude
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Do you accept the deal?

1:00PM - chutzpah

There are times when I am embarrassed to be registered as a Republican. Okay, quite a few times in the last eight years, but I could just say "those aren't real Republicans" (which they were and are not). But yesterday's mudslinging by the RNC was plain dumb. Not just because it isn't election time so they should be saving these things up for later, but because the complaints were wacky.

Apparently the President and First Lady went out on a date. Admittedly, they flew to New York using government services and may have been comped for the meal and show, but still. Let's see what conservative Fox News reports about this:

Even before the Obamas left Washington, the there-and-back trip drew criticism from Republicans. They questioned the president's decision to travel to New York for a night of entertainment during a recession and while automakers struggle to survive.

It was just a few months ago that auto executives were roundly criticized when they traveled to Washington for congressional hearings in pricey private planes.

Uhm.. that's nice. Except, see, auto execs flew up in lavish style so they could beg for money. Money so the executives could stockpile a few more million in their bank accounts before the inevitable happened (did anyone actually think they weren't going to file for bankruptcy?). Obama wasn't flying a private jet to beg for money. In fact, he probably isn't allowed to book his own travel, or to drive somewhere unprotected, or even to use his own money. There's just a wee bit of a disconnect there. Leader of the country. Head of a failing and failed corporation. Not quite the same thing.

I would also like to add, as an old-school Republican: what are you thinking, wanting the government to interfere with business? Aren't we supposed to be in favour of free markets? So shedding tears over GM failing and not getting massive bailouts comes from what part of our platform?

It is okay. I'm not really of the party. I registered that way because I knew which primary I wanted to vote in back then. They didn't even *sniff* give me a card! Which is good, because the Green side of me would need to recycle it.

6:00AM - Simpsons: the dream

I was just dreaming about watching a Simpsons episode. It turned out that either Lenny or Carl was actually an alien in disguise, and the family was going to reveal it during a ballgame. There was a great flashback scene to the alien landing, where there was a cameo with the voice of Bender being the voice of a beatup looking R2D2 trying to impress people that he was from the moon (but being usurped by the alien who was from further away). Then Homer was calling Marge on her phone, and cried out in that whingy should-be-sarcastic voice "Oh, why won't anyone pick up the voicemail?", a click on the phone, and his standard "Oh, thank god!". And then Milhouse appeared, and then..

..I woke up with my mouth completely dry and parched.

There are two lessons that can be learned from this.

One is: never put all of your standard water glasses into the dishwasher before going to sleep, otherwise when you wake up in the middle of the night and reach over to the nightstand you will be very disappointed.

The other, and more obvious one (don't all stories have secondary obvious morals like "don't taunt the small guy who happens to have spunk because he'll beat you later"?), is: anyone can come up with a better Simpsons episode than any of the ones put out in the last few years. Episodes from 2002 you can't beat, but the last few years have been sheer pain. Someone should take the show out behind the barn and.. oh, yeah, it's on Fox, never mind.

And now it's back to Nod for me.

6:00PM - alphabet soup

When searching for the album "a" by the artist "A" on Amazon (no, don't ask), I was confronted by an odd option. It listed several "A" things (a phone, a different album by that artist, a Raquel Welch flick, some strange album, and a certification test being the top five). But just below the section where it said what I was searching on it politely asked:

Did you mean: b

Why, yes, my hand just slipped about five keys across and up. That was definitely the letter I wanted!

(sadly enough, searching on "B" does not suggest that you should try "C")

11:00AM - confusing products

Browsing around again for a converter so I could hook my laptop up to my (oldish) television, I ran across a fairly cheap one on Amazon. Something about the "VideoSecu PC Laptop Mac Computor to TV Presentation Converter, VGA to Video VGA2TV 1L7" bothered me though, and it took a minute to figure out what the problem was.

It does not promise to convert images from computer to television. Instead, it claims to convert images from Computor to television.

I don't think I could afford to hire G-Force to exorcise my television. On the other hand, maybe the two vowels are commutative, so I would only have to pay for them to exercise my television, which would make it.. uhm, skinnier. Great.

6:00PM - twitty URLs

A lot of Twitter things are now using variants of TinyURL. Their own variants, of course, but it is still the same concept. The idea has been growing over the last five years or so, especially as URLs have an increasing amount of tracking parameters in them and look disgusting (few people take the time and effort to cull their URLs), but I've seen a lot more of them in the last month or three than I did a year ago. Probably it was an inevitable adaptation because of the 160 or so character limit.

But, you know? When I am using a real browser on a real computer not fully under my control? I'm not following a random link. Yes, mouseovers can lie about the destination, but the source almost always shows it (and when it looks sufficiently obfuscated you just don't follow the link). TinyURL style things don't reveal anything until you actually go there, and then they can redirect you to whatever Rusporn site they want to.

These small unknown-destination URLs may be the wave of the future. That's fine. I'm happy where I live now.

5:00PM - simple and probably wrong thoughts on food

Dear Tyler,

Maybe your food is ultimate. It didn't look amazing, but whatever. Still, as you add things or pour things into dishes, crying out "boom!" is a bit too blatant of a steal. Another catch phrase might be better.

The show I watched part of also made me wonder if tagines and the like evolved because some people stay in the basecamp cooking and others are hunting: whether the hunters return home with game or not the food will still be tasty (just toss in extra potatoes or what not) and will still be ready on time. I imagine so, because backup plans like "oh, you didn't catch any pheasants, let's order Domino's" were not feasible in those days.. but hindsight justifications with zero research put into them are always dubious.

6:00PM - cleanliness does not actually infer godlike powers

There are some people on the floor where I work who go into the bathroom, use the toilet, do not flush, do not wash their hands, and then leave. That seems rude, uncivil, and not particularly sanitary even for that person. Perhaps they are really hard at work and are hoping to catch some dread virus so they can take some time off. But they are not the most bizarre subset.

That would be the people who slam their hip against the handicapped door plate (which opens the door and leaves it open for twenty seconds, much to the joy of those already in there), do their thing, do not flush, but then just before using the handicapped door plate to leave, spend almost a minute with soap and water carefully cleaning their hands. Clearly it's not cool to leave your germs around for others, but let's ignore that anti-social action. What's on their hands? Are they worried about contaminating themselves with their own germs? "Oh no, I have an auto-immune problem whereby if I accidentally touch myself with my hands I'll infect myself!" They didn't touch anything other than themselves, aside from the toilet paper roll, and if they are worried about that then they need to take much more invasive precautions.

I just don't get it. I don't understand the first subset of people either, but the motivation behind this group seems even stranger.

5:00PM - ah, sweet headaches

There's not much like leaving work early because you feel tired and achy and headachy, only to be stuck in traffic on the way home due to stalled cars, arrive to find they just started some street construction down the block and that the upstairs neighbour who has no job has decided to start blasting out his music. It is much like the bus that passes me every single morning: clearly reality is out to get me.

I probably exaggerate; there could be something quite a lot like that. Not sure I want to consider that.

5:00PM - you can have one for the price of two

As my laptop battery holds less and less charge, I have been reading up on ways to maintain it. Apparently the old methods of fully charging and then fully draining it are not accurate in our new world order of lithium ion batteries. From everything I have read, you should not let it drop below about 35%, should not charge it over 85%, and should store the battery when it is around 40%.

Uhm. When did batteries start to suck massively? I don't get this. So in other words, instead of ever having a full charge, I should use at most half of the charge of my battery, and need to constantly monitor it?

"Here are the keys to your new car, sir. Be sure to read the warranty terms for the gas tank."
"The gas tank?"
"Yes, sir. You have the ten gallon model. If you go below three gallons, rust spots will start to appear."
"Uhm, okay, so I'll keep it full."
"Oh, no, sir: anything over eight gallons and you void your warranty, as that causes the windshield to crack."
"So you're saying I have a five gallon tank?"
"Why, not at all: it is a ten gallon tank. You simply have to take care of it to keep it within optimal parameters."
"I was thinking of going on a trip next weekend..."
"If you do not drive it before the trip, make sure it only has four gallons in the tank when you start."
"Four gallons? That won't even get me out of the bay area!"
"Well, you can refill it on the way. Preferably before it drops below three gallons. Rust, you know. And don't fill it all the way."

I do not doubt that they might be right, as my full charging and discharging has not been working well. But really, I expect to be able to use more than 50% of something, unless I am offered at least a 50% discount on it. And that discount had better include weight.

8:00AM - unwise trucks

I just observed the trash truck going down the one-way street behind my apartment building the wrong way. Again. This never happened until about a month ago, and has been constant since then, so it must be a new driver or a route "optimization".

The thing is, that street was already scary. It's just one lane, highly curved, up a really steep hill. Imagine turning onto it and driving up only to suddenly see this five ton truck barreling down the hill at you from ten feet away.

I always instinctively avoided driving up that street. Not just because it didn't really go where I wanted to go, but it looked sort of dangerous. Never did I consider the Indiana Jones effect.

5:00AM - magnetic clasps

Today's yugster deal is a set of magnetic extenders and clasps for necklaces. While I do feel that most necklaces are difficult to fasten and unfasten, I'm not sure that this is a good idea. Velcro shoes? That's fine, and convenient. A velcro purse, where you can quickly detach it from the strap? Probably not a good thing unless you are the sort of person who enjoys filling their purse with explosives and carries a remote detonator around to help cull the local population of petty criminals. Most people wear necklaces which are either expensive or have personal value, and in neither case do you want it to be something easily snatchable.

Magnets are cool in many contexts. This just is not one of them.

(hmm, I wonder if there are shoes with magnetic clasps.. probably not, they wouldn't be strong enough)

5:00AM - clocks

One of the things that really surprised me on this last vacation was that neither of the places I stayed at featured clocks. Okay, in the first place there was one clock propped up in a corner of one of the bathrooms, but that was not a central point. In the second place there was not even that. There were a few ancillary clocks, such as the clock on the microwave or on the VCR, but I do not consider those to be actual clocks.

In my apartment, I am surrounded by clocks. Daylight saving time changes are a nightmare, but wherever I am I know what time it is. Clocks, like all devices that measure things, are neat. But perhaps this appreciation is not global. So I am curious:

For the purposes of these questions, "clock" is defined as a mechanism for which one of the primary purposes is measuring and displaying the time. A clock/thermometer device counts. A computer or cell phone does not.

Poll #1403367 clocks
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

How many clocks are there in your place of residence?

Averaging the places you work, go to school, or hang out at for long periods of time these days, how many clocks are visible from where you normally sit?

9:00AM - ballad of fallen angels

A long time ago, in a galaxy relatively nearby, I read a Dan Brown book. "Angels and Demons".

Someone I worked with recommended it. Highly, and although I knew he had only read three books in the last five years, jobwise it seemed smart to read it. It would only be a few hours of my life, and I would probably get a good post out of it, so why not?

Forty pages into it I realized that there simply was not enough vitriol in the world to fit within my post. I already had already racked up a dozen serious complaints, and it would not be fair to use up all that vitriol. So I just finished it and returned it. When asked by said co-worker, my comment was something like "it wasn't my sort of book", which proves that Miss Manners, Mother Teresa, Maria Von Trapp, and Mary Poppins all simultaneously possessed me and allowed me a moment of tact.

Fast forward to this morning when I hear that "Angels and Demons" outsold "Star Trek" at the theatres over the weekend. My faith in humanity is not great most days; I believe few people could escape an open cardboard box unless some bully came up and shoved them. But: really?

It is possible that every person I know who watched "Star Trek" lied, and that even though the worst complaints I have heard centre around the halo effects and Uhura not having a chair, the movie was horrible. It is also conceivable that whoever directed "Angels and Demons" had never read the book and did not care at all about authenticity so managed to create a masterpiece that just happens to share the same name.

It is also possible that I am Shaq. You will buy my shoes. Don't make me stoop over so I can glower at you!

So sad.

11:00AM - who likes short shorts?

Not the garment manufacturers, apparently. You might think that they would, since they could sell a product that uses less cloth and charge more for it. Bikinis are a perfect case in point. But shorts? Apparently not.

When the inseam is best measured in feet rather than in inches, and it falls below your knees, it is not a pair of shorts. Those are called "longs". To call them shorts is equivalent to pointing at an ankle-length evening dress and calling it a miniskirt.

Six inches, tops. Three is better. But they just don't make those anymore. Or if they do, they are not sold at the standard retailers I frequent.

(why, yes, it is rather warm right now where I live; why do you ask?)

7:00AM - another quiz thingy

Ganked from furfybird who was seen via madbard. Besides, I haven't had a chance to use this icon in a while.

( 36 questions and slightly fewer answers )

4:00AM - season finales

It looks like television producers have learned a new trick: have an episode that seems like a massive cliffhanger season finale, but then have one more episode after that as the actual finale. At least, they did that with Bones and Numbers. I'm not caught up on other things. It is not a huge evolutionary step; we're probably decades away from the next "Who Shot JR" phase. To be honest, I can only tell a season is over when the TiVo stops recording episodes for a while and then starts up again, sometimes with a change of cast. They really should not bother.

In better news, the local PBS station that was showing Red Dwarf ran out of episodes so is looping back to season one. Yaaaaaaawwww! First season Cat, before they stereotyped the character away, simply cannot be beat. "I'm gonna eat you little fishie!" "Too slow, chicken marengo!"

I also finished the Doctor Who Easter special yesterday. I know, it's a bit after traditional Easter. Let us just pretend that I am ultra-orthodox and therefore use an antiquated calendar that somehow has Easter in the latter half of May. Back then it took the moon a lot longer to cross over the world because the earth was flat, you know? Anyhow, now I can finally watch the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre rendition of the episode (courtesy of the_narfer). It cannot be any worse than the original. (edit: bwa ha ha, it was most excellent!)

9:00AM - babies

The ticker on my morning news reported:

"Pfizer offers jobless Americans free Viagra"

Oh, good show. Now instead of twiddling their thumbs, all those people who have lost their jobs and cannot afford their mortgages can twiddle something else, creating more hungry mouths that they cannot feed. This is either (a) a really silly idea someone up in marketing came up with, (b) an obvious drug pusher ploy to hook a new demographic onto their product, or (c) akin to passing out smallpox-infected blankets. We are not cradled in the comforting arms of the Bush regime these days, so I'll toss out (c). It is not clear to me what percentage of the decision was (a) or (b).

On a side note, all you Notre Dame almost-graduates who are refusing to go to your own commencement speech -- given by the President -- because he might not be the purest embodiment of Catholicism? That's nice. Just think of it this way. In fifty years when you are in a nursing home, desperate to get your great^N-grandkids to come visit you to rip you out of the tedium of existence, consider your ability to regale them with stories of all the famous people you saw. "Well, I could have heard Obama speak at my commencement, but I had these moral issues.. hey, wait, where are you going? You're coming back next week, right?" Great way to gain street cred.

6:00AM - so much to say, so little creativity

I'll just mention two things about my vacation for now.

One, although I wrote about the culture shock of going from a place where people zoom around crowded highways at insane speeds to the countryside where people go the speed limit on lightly used but well maintained roads, it is nothing compared to the reverse. I have lived in the Oakland area for almost half of my life now so should be used to it, but the sudden "whoa, ambient traffic is going 25mph over the speed limit and there are tons of cars all around" factor was incredible. I can see why people who mostly live in more rural or suburban settings think inner city highway driving is insane. It is a controlled insanity, but requires a different sort of concentration.

Two, it is very nice to sleep in my own bed. I just cannot sleep in foreign beds unless completely exhausted, and even then will toss and turn. Climate control is one factor in it; I know where the closet is for different blankets and have a primitive way to control temperature (fans and windows). But mostly it is the feel of the bed and the pillows.

It is good to be home.

12:00PM - rural areas

Driving through rural areas in the midwest is certainly quite a contrast to the urban area I live in. At one point while driving down a state highway (which was in remarkable shape) ten minutes went by without me seeing a single car on the road. I found myself crying out "Why did they build this highway? Nobody uses it. There is nothing at the end of it aside from a right angle turn onto another highway nobody uses." Of course, I was using it, so maybe the government planned decades in advance and maintained it just for me.

The other fun thing was that when I saw the driver, I waved, and he waved back! You just don't see that in Oakland.

There are lame things about being in a no-stoplight town, though. Such as the lack of a restaurant. Such as staying in a place so beat up that they don't bother with things like locks, or sometimes even doorknobs. Such as asking for the password for their wireless network and being told "oh, there is no password". Uh, huh, an insecured network. Joy.

So I VPN into work through the encrypted tunnel which requires an RSA key. That probably violates their terms, but is the only way I can do anything online that requires cookies. It also proactively disconnects and reauthenticates you every half hour, so in general I won't be online much for the next few days.

9:00AM - lotteries

It puzzles me that people get excited to find out what store sold the winning lottery ticket and rush out to that store to buy tickets.

I can understand reporting it from a media standpoint: the lottery companies probably pay them good money to insert stories like that, because then they can go to other stores and say "see? if you sold tickets you might get statewide media coverage and a whole bunch of people coming in to buy stuff". But why does the average ticket buyer care? Do they think that store may have gotten the Magic Shipment Of Winning Tickets™? Even if the store did, if you pick your own numbers, how could it possibly matter where you bought your expensive slip of paper from?

It makes about as much sense to me as the "strategy" I saw on some web site a few years back. They listed all the number combinations that had ever won, then argued that since these are the only number sequences ever to have won, the odds of any other sequence winning in the future are zero. Uh huh.

4:00PM - and the iPeople shall inherit the earth

From some spam I just received:

"Get Bigger, Harder, More Intense iErections"

I, for one, do not welcome our new glossy white plastic lords and masters.

2:00PM - sequence diagram generators

If you use UML sequence diagrams, http://www.websequencediagrams.com/ might interest you. It's a little text interface for making simple sequence diagrams online.

If you did not understand the fourth through sixth words in the first sentence of the content of this post as being something intelligible, you might not be interested, but could still find it fun to play with. If UML sequence diagrams excite you. Which they probably would not, given the precondition. Ah, well.

9:00AM - pride and prejudice

I'd just like to say one thing to Buffett and all the economic experts and pundits who have come out over the last few weeks saying "oh my, the economy might actually be headed towards recovery": yeah, been there, said that. The point is you need to predict the bottom before you are already on the upwards slope. Any fool can see that a market that climbed ten percent in a month or so is kind of a sign of recovery.

I will admit that I was wrong about the actual bottom: instead of dropping just another five to ten percent from when I called the baseline, there was a one week spike where it dropped twenty percent. But that's still not bad. If I ever lose half of my brain and cannot program anymore I'll buy some nice clothes and become one of those economic pundits.

For the prejudice part, to all those who suddenly got scared and cried wolf because Chrysler had to declare bankruptcy? You actually thought they would get out of it alive? And now you're happy because Fiat, a company not doing too well, is going to merge with bankrupt Chrysler and practically bankrupt Opal? Uh huh. Don't quit your day job; you provide an excellent source of humour.