The Book of Merle

8:00PM - walking the good walk

For the purpose of moving personal possessions from one workplace to the next, I conscripted the aid of an old shoebox for holding some of the more delicate items. Looking at it today, I see the shoebox has a URL on it: www.earthvegan.us. That's right, the shoes it contained were vegan.

Although their FAQ dissuades one from the idea, I can picture walking to the bus stop and having my shoes suddenly shift course to avoid stepping on an egg. It makes me wonder: if I layer the floor around me with eggs, then jump into the air, will the shoes levitate me harmlessly over them? More likely I would crash to the ground and the warranty on the shoes would be invalidated. "I'm sorry, ma'am, these shoes trod on animal products, so cannot be returned."

Vegan shoes. I'm not really certain that making shoes out of entirely synthetic material helps protect animals anyway.

7:00AM - insecure passwords

Why do financial institutions have the most strict, yet least secure password validation schemes?

Signing up for a free web email account requires the choice of a somewhat cryptographically secure password (number, letter, symbol, 8 characters). Signing up for a financial account where you will put thousands of dollars has insanely weak restrictions. Most places require only letters and numbers. One requires letters and numbers, but there must be a number between two letters (huh? can we say "decreases search space when cracking?"). Only one bank I have encountered allows for symbols. The firm that handled my 401k just three years ago required numbers only, presumably so people could enter their password from phones. Not just that, but your password had to be exactly.. four digits long.

Four digits. To protect my retirement.

This is not thirty years ago, when people rolled their own "encryption" algorithms. There are countless one-way encryption algorithms out there that are considered industry-standard, which exist in libraries for just about every imaginable programming language. None of them (as far as I know) have restrictions that would disallow symbols. So why is it that every time I sign up for an electronic financial thing that my initial reaction is to jerk back and say "no, that doesn't look right, I'm not going there"?

Financial institutions of the world: get your act together. The rest of us have secure rotating PRNG devices and strong encryption. You have money and power, and can obviously force your customer base to comply. Do the right thing, and stop driving the rest of us down into the gutter to chip flakes of stone off of primitive axes.

1:00PM - a letter to the sun

Dear Dreaded Baleful Ball of Fire That Hovers in the Sky Every Day,

Apologies if I caused offense in giving you that title. While accuracy is important, I would be content calling you Taiyo-sama, if preferred. Or just Sun Boy.

Anyway, I'm writing because one worships and placates gods primarily in order to get them to go away. You're powerful and all that, but us peons just want to live in peace. Given the horrific heat wave yesterday, I would like to offer you a sacrifice to get you to move on to some other part of the country. North Dakota, perhaps? Nobody much cares what happens to them. You can have Guam, too.

Unfortunately, you do not seem to have a Facebook presence, so I have to guess at the sacrifices you might want. For now there is a glass of water on the windowsill: perhaps you can see it? It's for you. Just go away.

No love and fewer hugs,
merle_

8:00PM - cash me out, jesus!

From the back of an envelope found in my mail today (no caps since it was all in uppercase, and, well, that's annoying):

dear jesus,
we pray that you will bless someone in this home spiritually, physically & financially. and please dear lord, bless the one who's hands open this letter. make good changes in this one's life and give them the desires of their heart. we pray over and bless this letter in your holy name. amen

Uhm. Ignoring the grammatical and lexical errors, rife though they might be, and the bizarre underlining scheme.. when did the Christian god start to promise financial incentives? I thought the whole point was to suffer for some finite time on Earth to then bask in bliss for eternity. When did the "desires of their heart" start being granted? That would be an amazing incentive towards conversion.

The front side of the envelope indicates that there is a "Cross, Blessed for you" inside (along with many more underlined phrases). It also suggests that another family must get this envelope after me.

Which suggests to me that Saint Matthew's Churches wants me to put this in the recycling bin, so someone dumpster-diving might discover The Word. Or at least learn how to underline things improperly.

2:00PM - let the lawsuits begin!

Suppose you were one of the same-sex couples married in San Francisco several years ago, when Gavin Newsom had just been elected mayor. Said marriages have been contested in courts for years, but today the marriages were declared good to go.

Do you think the government will punitively demand refiling of income tax forms, just to get the funds from the marriage tax penalty?

In completely unrelated news, it sometimes scares me when I look up the lyrics to a song I just decided I really love, only to find that the lyrics say something I would agree with. It happens the other way around, too, but to pick one song out of seventy in a language I do not speak and choose it, then to consciously interpret the lyrics.. creepy. Way cool, but creepy.

Rugby, it's now 96979899?!°F outside. I can feel roils of heat coming off the windows. And I'm one of the lucky ones to be in a place with air conditioning today...

12:00PM - insane weather

Rugby, it's hot outside.

Last night it got down to about 70°F/21°C at the coolest part of the night. This did little to cool off my apartment. The weather forecast this morning was completely scary. The 9am weather looked like the daily highs in the summertime, and by noon they were using colours I did not recall existed. As the entire bay area was covered in purple, I started to wonder if they would have to move into the ultraviolet spectrum to describe the highs.

I've been checking every five minutes for the last half hour, and it has gone up every single time. (ooh, look, up another .4°F) Now it's around 93°F/34°C. And there are two or three hours left before the daily high will be set.

Whichever of the four horsemen is responsible for this, I want him replaced. Unless this actually is the apocalypse, there's no excuse for such weather a month before summer officially starts. And if it is the apocalypse, well, some advance notice would have been nice.

So much for my plan to buy an electric skillet to use rather than the stove when it's hot outside. The revised plan is to just set some aluminium foil out on the concrete balcony. Foreman can have his wussy rotating oven thing; I can cook things much more quickly.

7:00AM - I hair you!

A crossword puzzle this morning wanted a word meaning "defies", and I'd gotten as far as "bea__s" before giving up. Clearly I had some letter wrong. Nope! According to Webster, there's an old usage of "to beard" which means "to defy". I kind of look forward to the opportunity to shout out "ha, I beard you, old man!" in the coming days.

This also suggests that ZZ Top was a much more anarchistic band than I had thought they were...

5:00PM - well, I didn't expect that

Had you told me that the next band I would fixate on would be a ska band, I would have raised an eyebrow and snorted. Ska punk might get a slight bonus.. but ska punk in Spanish, a language I barely have bus-proficiency in? I would have laughed at you.

And yet it is the case. Exposure to Ska-P in the casual carpool drew me in enough to actually ask the driver what the name of the group was (thereby violating the unspoken "do not bother the driver" rule: it took me twenty minutes to work up enough nerve to ask). Research indicates "¡¡Que Corra la Voz!!" was the album he was playing (albeit oddly shuffled). What attracted me was probably the wide range of styles: some songs are based on Scottish folk music or metal or polka or "Hall of the Mountain King" or Dixie or.. well, you do have to put up with the ska bit, but there is a wide variety, all well done.

And six hours later I'm still listening to the group nonstop. Guess I'm hooked.

If I start singing praises to calypso-country groups, though.. then you'll know I have gone insane. Some bridges are drawbridges that have already been drawn up.

9:00AM - bizarre mp3 player description

One guide to linux mp3 players suggests that Juk has an "idiot-proof girl/child-friendly gui".

Uhm. What does it mean for a GUI to be "girl/child-friendly"? The phrase sounds somewhat offensive; I can't decide if it is or not.

1:00PM - when Darwin attacks

*realizes there is only one bite of taco left but lots of hot sauce*
*carefully pours hot sauce on top*
*thinks "now I'd better be careful not to get this on my hands, or I'll rub my eye later"*
*picks up taco bite, watching as the hot sauce cascades all over my thumb and fingers*

*sigh* At least I found a taco truck near my new job.

In other fun news, my linux box at work thinks .cpp files should be opened by OpenOffice. Apparently they have something to do with Word, even though for at least two decades that extension has meant it was C source code. I am not impressed.

1:00PM - free money from the electric company

PG&E sent me a letter offering me $25 if I let them install a free SmartAC switch. It's a system whereby PG&E, the energy company, can broadcast signals during peak energy usage times to throttle back on air conditioners. Supposedly this will prevent blackouts (aside from those caused by heat exhaustion, of course). It's tempting. I can see it now:

Me: Hi, I'd like $25 and a free switch!
PG&E: No problem, we'll send someone over. Be at home during the daytime for the next three months.
Me: Okay, thanks!
*four months pass by*
PG&E: Hi, we're here to install your free Big Brother switch.
Me: *grumbles "about time" under breath* Excellent!
PG&E: Would you point us towards your thermostat?
Me: Oh, I don't have one.
PG&E: What?
Me: I just use fans and windows.
PG&E: No air conditioner?
Me: I like to think of it as an inexpensive air conditioner.
Me: The switch will make an interesting wall hanging anyway. So where's my $25?
PG&E: ...

6:00PM - movies keep getting better and better

Tonight the SciFi channel is showing "Aztec Rex". Doesn't just the name of it make you want to run away screaming? The plot, as you might surmise, revolves around some conquistadors trying to take over some Aztecs. And there's a huge carnivorous dinosaur! Or maybe two!

I'm just waiting for "Tarzan and Mothra Versus Jurassic Park", which clearly involves Tarzan stumbling across a Nazi dimensional distorter, zapping himself over to Japan, confronting Mothra with a bevy of scientists, and accidentally sending themselves back in time. There the distorter will be stolen by a pterodactyl ("ooh, shiny!") and they will have to trek across a jungle and up cliffs to retrieve it while fighting off carnivorous dinosaurs. Tarzan would, of course, hit it off with one of the twin Mothra girls. And then undead Hitler would...

*sigh*

1:00PM - i fought the internet, and the internet won

Because eggs can have egg pants, I had to wonder: once the sweet pea hatches from its pod, are there sweet pea pants for them? So I googled.

Windsurfing. Tennis. Football!

I'm going offline for a bit now and try not to even think about the matches I found.

In other news, while trying to find a sport that started with 'w', one of the first matches was wheelchair rugby, which inadvertently caused me to understand a previously read reference to something called "murderball". Rugby, in armoured wheelchairs. Wow.

12:00PM - sugar peas

Mmm.. fresh sugar peas from the farmers market. They're like peas, only with sugar.

Okay, they taste nothing like that. But their texture is fun.

8:00PM - a shiny gold star for LJ

When I discovered one of my email accounts had been compromised, I contacted the provider, trying to resolve the issue. As mentioned before, not much happened initially. I started with the provider, and only after realizing it was pointless started asking LJ if they could alter my "initial primary" email address (paid account should count for validation, no?).

My interactions with the email provider over the last ten days can be summed up as follows:

Me: My email was compromised, it's an old account, I'm not sure how to validate myself.
Prv: Please provide name, dob, ssn, cc#, security question, etc.
Me: As stated before, this account was created in 1996. You did not collect such information then, so it will not be on file.
Prv: Please provide name, dob, ssn, cc#, security question, etc.
Me: Here's all sorts of info. It will not match your files since you do not have this information.
Prv: What you gave us does not match our information on file.
Me: Indeed. Here is some more info, but as described, you will not be able to match it.
Prv: What you gave us does not match our information on file.
Me: ...

LiveJournal, though, was swift once I contacted them. Name, billing address, four numbers from the credit card, and they patched up both my paid account and my unpaid (and delinquent) merle_food account in a day and a half. Over the weekend. Not only that, but after they sent email saying it was fixed, I sent a quick "thanks for taking care of this so quickly!" email out.. and got a "you're welcome!" reply!

I am formally impressed. This account was the main concern I had. Honestly, the email account was ancient and got thousands of spam messages a day. It was neat to have, but I can live without it: a dozen years is a rugby fine run down the endzone. I still want it back to purge it, but that's looking less and less likely as time goes on.

In other news, new work place is going along fine. I discovered an Indian restaurant somewhat nearby. The resultant almost-coma from an extra spicy vindaloo that kicked in during the after-lunch meeting almost did me in, but it was well worth it.

12:00PM - a clear favourite

"Rugby" seems to have beat its way to the top of my favourite new category of curse words. It seems like an appropriate winner. Fast, senseless, violent, unpredictable, and sudden: who knows when those young whippersnappers ahead of you will burst out into a game of rugby, causing irreparable property damage and scaring terrorists away? Most sports fall into the middle range, but rugby works when you really want to evoke emotion.

Badminton, though.. I'm not sure there's a use for it. "Badminton, this is a pretty average sheet of paper." "Badminton, I'm down to only twenty rolls of toilet paper left for personal use." It evokes the same lack of emotional horror that "shuckydarns" does. Therefore, much as some have promoted chess and Texas hold-em' to the role of sports, I hereby demote badminton to the roles of hobby or game.

8:00AM - guam

On the donkey side, Guam has eight delegates with half a vote each (meaning four actual delegates), and five super delegates.

Did the Justice League move to Guam or something? How could they have more "super" delegates than normal ones? Why do we even own Guam when it is at least six thousand miles away and doesn't even get a star on our flag? Aside from the chance that we elect a fascist dictator who declares war on the entire world, why would they even care who we elect? They would be better off sacrificing small Japanese boys to Godzilla (although that might have an impact on their tourism industry).

One of these days I'll understand the world, and they'll award me with a tight white jacket.

1:00PM - seen clearly through the mist

A movie is apparently being made based on the computer game Myst. It should be a thrill a minute. The hero will appear in a scenic vista, wander back and forth, turn dials, wander some more, turn some more dials, scowl in frustration, wander some more, turn some more dials.. let me tell you, even Ebert would give it a thumb sideways as he slumps down into sleep from sheer boredom.

In other news, about a half a year ago I was in a discussion about LJ's policy of how accounts can be resurrected if someone steals your password. They go by the "the earlier email address on file wins" policy. I recall pointing out that (a) if you apply at uni and someone else gets that email next year, you're hosed, and (b) if that account no longer exists, you're still hosed. Consensus was that I was needlessly worrying, and "everyone" agreed that it was a good system.

Well, my original email account was compromised. Coincidentally or not, during the same week I left one job for another. I doubt the password was guessed, but cannot tell what really happened. Because it was a web-based email account set up millennia ago (fine, twelve years), there is no security question, date of birth, name, or anything else on file to allow me to recover it (and if there were, wouldn't those have been changed by now?). Feh. The provider in question is being unhelpful in even attempting to resolve this. I can't say that I completely blame them, since verifying me would be nigh impossible, but am quite irritated. LJ isn't being helpful at removing that email address either.

So if you see me doing strange things, y.. oh. Yeah. It's me. If you see me doing totally unconscionable thi.. hmm. Rugby! Fine, if I don't conform to my standard non-standard grammatical and rhetorical constructs, you'll know it isn't really me.

10:00PM - looking on the bright side

The good thing about arriving to work early and then staying very, very late due to a problem nobody can figure out is that by the wee hours the subway is relatively empty, allowing one to get a seat.

It is always good to find the silver lining. Not only does it keep one sane, but if the repo man starts coming around, one can rip off as much of the lining as possible, stuff it into a bag, and run like the wind.

9:00PM - the age of free access

The news tonight claimed that "April 30th marks the day the inventors of the world wide web announced it would be available free of charge to everybody with a phone connection".

That's an interesting view of history. Any comments, Mr. Gore?

And to think I've shelled out tons of money all these years to get access, even after the purchase of a phone connection. What a shill I must be.

10:00AM - a strange quiz algorithm

Many quizzes ask you for your gender, age, household income, SSN, and all sorts of personal things. For scientific studies I would provide some of that information, but for "get a happy image for your journal so other kids can see how cool you are" quizzes, I pick randomly. The gender answer is used by a most of them to filter out the list of possible outcomes (especially if the outcomes are gendered), which is why the "What Tarot Card Are You?" quiz outcome surprised me (I chose male):

You are The High Priestess
Science, Wisdom, Knowledge, Education
The High Priestess is the card of knowledge, instinctual, supernatural, secret knowledge. She holds scrolls of arcane information that she might, or might not reveal to you. The moon crown on her head as well as the crescent by her foot indicates her willingness to illuminate what you otherwise might not see, reveal the secrets you need to know. The High Priestess is also associated with the moon however and can also indicate change or fluctuation, particularly when it comes to your moods.

7:00AM - baseball, the new curse

I need new vituperative words. If kids elsewhere are like they are around here, traditional curses and swear words no longer have any semantic meaning. If you swear every third word, either you are misusing the words as an "uhm" filler, the words have lost their meaning, or you have so much anger that you really need to be locked up for the good of society. The latter would be fine by me, except then there would be nobody to make coffee-coloured substances at Starbucks, and the financial world would come crashing down as business people collapse into hysterics.

But where to find new words that would be meaningful to me? I could learn to swear in another language, but that's a cop-out. Besides, if someone passed by who knew that language, it might offend them. So I need something I dislike: sports!

It could go two ways. I could choose seasonally appropriate terms, which would be nice for the variation, but would require me to actually know what sports are played when. Or I could choose terms based on connotations. Basketball could be used to indicate sexual invective ("basketball, you look great!"), rugby for violence ("I'm gonna rugby punch your block off"), curling for.. hmm. Maybe we'll leave curling out of the mix. Golf is an obvious choice for duration or boredom ("that was a golfing long meeting").

And it gets more fun when swearing about sports: "those baseball football fans, I want to rugby kill them".

*looks down at list for global domination* "Thoroughly corrupt English so nobody can communicate with each other".. hmm, that's half a check.

5:00PM - in which merle_ does not become insanely wealthy

I was just outside, misting off the windows (cools the apartment, traps pollen), when I noticed a rainbow forming in the air. With great care, I kept the nozzle pointed in the same direction, and noted where the arc of the rainbow ended. It was in a nearby flowerpot. Jackpot!

But nooooo. When I looked, there was nothing in there but dirt and weeds. Not even goldenrods, just ugly weeds.

Damn you, leprechauns! You tricked me with your green clovers and blue diamonds, and now you create faux rainbows for me to follow? Sure, it was a tiny rainbow, but would one gold piece have been too much to ask for at the end of it?

4:00PM - widescreen displays

Widescreen is all the rage. "It's bigger!", they'll tell you. Well.. it's wider, that's for sure. But consider that monitors and television screens are measured along the diagonal and you'll see it for the ripoff it is.

Assume we are talking about 14" screens. A square one would have sides of just under 10", making for 98sqin of screen space. Older CRT monitors had a 4:3 ratio, or 11.2"x8.4"~=94sqin viewable area. Now move to widescreen, at a 16:9 ratio, and you have an 11.7"x6.6"~=77.6sqin viewable area. Continue this argument to the ludicrous extreme and you end up with a 14" monitor that is 14" wide and just one pixel in height. Whoo! Just right for those Turing machines you really want to watch.

I will say one nice thing about widescreen formats for movies and shows: on older screens it gives you a gap of black on top and bottom. That annoyed me initially, but now that I am watching things on my computer where it wants to place controls on the screen, it is nice to have an empty area to put them where it does not obscure the show.

10:00AM - psa: electronic waste, SF bay area

For those of you in the Oakland area who might have old, dead electronic items lying around, Universal Waste Management allows people to come by their warehouse (which is open on Saturday, too) and drop items off -- for free. Most other places I have looked at charge processing fees of up to $45 per item, which strikes me as absurd, since we Californians already pay a "recycling fee" when we purchase such goods. They also have events scattered around the bay area now and then (today's is at the Emeryville IKEA).

Now I just need to slough all the data off those hard drives and purge them...

Credit for discovering this goes to KRON4 weekend morning news. I pray to whatever entities or non-entities may or may not exist that they are not bought out by Fox or NBC and return to being a "normal" station. *shudder*

1:00PM - OSX numpad fixer

Ha ha, yes!

I have to give thanks to someone who was asking about.. drat, it's locked. You know who you are, you get the thanks, even if it was serendipity. Anyway, after over two years of suffering with the stupid OSX "users don't want the numpad to work like arrow keys" philosophy, I finally found a solution!

It was while searching for something which I didn't end up finding. Just as I was giving up on my search parameters and typing in new ones, I noticed "fixing the numeric keypad directional keys" as a link on the bottom of the screen. Quickly going there, the post ranted about the problems I had had, and pointed to KeyRemap4MacBook. Now when I move from a computer where the numpad works to OSX, I won't be surprised when typing on it to scroll around ends up navigating me somewhere bizarre.

HA!

8:00AM - friday poll time

Who really cares if someone prefers Clinton or Obama? That's been asked thousands of times. Here at Chez merle_, only the most important of questions will be asked.

Poll #1176900 The Important™ Poll
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

Do you enjoy surveys?

Even surveys where the radio button choices are insufficient?

Do all surveys have to offer a silly answer?

Why?

Why are the days of the week always capitalized?

Will the results of this survey be interesting?

7:00AM - strange days

Just like yesterday, I woke up and realized I didn't have to go into work. It is neither a holiday nor a weekend, and I am not using up paid leave time. That has not happened in years. Someone at the company I just left asked me "so how does it feel being free?". All I could think to say was that it felt kind of like Saturday.

And my brain still wakes me up before the alarm would have rung, even knowing that I did not set it. *sigh* Well, things will be back to normal on Monday.

6:00PM - $4 gasoline

It was just under two months ago when Bush berated a reporter for even suggesting the possibility gas would rise over $4 a gallon.

It has been just over that level all week at a nearby station, as you can see (~180k).

Franklin may have been wrong when he thought the turkey should be our national bird. The ostrich seems more appropriate these days. After all, we also have to import them from overseas...

10:00AM - selling cars

BMW has a new (?) slogan out for selling their X6: "a coupe above". Kind of cute, using the French verb couper (to cut) as a pun, but X6? That's not a sexy name.

Their marketing department should realize that a fair number of people who buy the high-end luxury cars do so for status and the appearance of financial success, and trade them in every year for the latest model. If they make a new model every year, why not pull a trick from the US Treasury? Name each new model after a state.

Then they could claim it was a coupe d'état.

3:00PM - another instance of path optimization

Most people choose paths that require the fewest number of turns and use the major streets when walking somewhere. When in an area with stop lights, especially on crowded sidewalks with poorly timed lights, it just doesn't make sense.

As a bunch of us left dim sum, I said that I wanted to go past the ATM but would catch up with them, so took a different path. BofA being the sweet, kind-hearted bank that they are, had apparently removed the ATMs at the Pacific Renaissance Plaza, spackling up the wall as if they had never existed. I stood there for a moment, then walked up and down, wondering where they might have gone to, with no luck. So I set out on an intercept, turning where it seemed appropriate.

I ended up on Broadway and looked around for everyone else, but did not see them. Just as I was about to give up, I saw them almost a block behind me. It wasn't walking speed, just the really bad pathfinding choice they made. I knew turning at appropriate lights was optimal, but only in a 5-10% gain sense: in this case it was a gain of an entire block after walking just five blocks (and standing around for half a minute). Freaky.

Hence, a public service announcement: walking down Broadway in downtown Oakland is highly suboptimal.

5:00AM - it's pollutin' time!

Hey, it's no longer Earth Day. We're all free to start polluting again!

At least until International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer. What a dorky name. Does everything have a holiday already? If so, I would like to know when International Worship merle_ Day is. I could wander the streets berating people for not prostrating themselves or showering me with money (bills, please, no coins).

If no such day exists, when should it be? January 1st comes to mind. Nothing important happens then, and I can pretend know that the fireworks at the beginning of the day are a celebration of me.

11:00AM - ground zero

Since when did "ground zero" start to refer to things other than bombs, especially nuclear ones, that go off on the surface of the earth? It confused me to hear that the Catholic pope was visiting ground zero today, but that he was still in the United States. Probably I have just been living under an enlightened shield of media ignorance for the last few years.

7:00AM - leaving the news out of the news

One of the big "news" stories yesterday was that one of Bill Clinton's people came out and said he would support Barack Obama instead of Hillary Clinton. All I could think to say was "uhm, okay, so what?".

Let's see: it has been at least eight years. I would hope people would evolve slightly different political beliefs over such a span of time. But the main thing that makes this not news is that it was a supporter of Bill, not Hillary. People are different, even if married. As a five year old I knew that my grandmother hated sports with a passion, and my grandfather loved them. If sports were a big issue in the upcoming election (And why not? "American Presidential Nominee Gladiators", we could call it. It would, of course, be a "reality" show...), siding with one of them would mean siding against the other.

Not only was this not news, but it was not even the slightest bit important. Unless the news industry wants to bash Hillary by trying to sway those with the reasoning ability of four year olds. Which, now that I think about it, was probably their strategy all along...

1:00PM - *pants* mmm, tasty

I returned to what used to be my standard Vietnamese restaurant, Pho 84, for my standard dish. They have raised prices far too high over the years, and are insanely popular and crowded, but they make a spicy tofu curry with black mushrooms, clear vermicelli, onions, garlic, and coconut milk that no other restaurant gets quite right. Expensive for a vegetarian dish, but very tasty.

As always, I ordered mine extra spicy. Just for kicks I asked for extra garlic as well, and reiterated both extras at the end of my order.

Reality is slowly dribbling away around me as I pant and sweat, but it is so good I cannot stop eating. They really do aim to please, and this waiter knows that I mean what I ask for. To paraphrase a character of Clarke's, "my god, it's full of garlic". If they used less than an entire head of garlic in my dish I would be surprised.

Garlic: check. Wooden stakes: well, a pair of garlic-infused chopsticks are close enough. Vampires to hunt: darn, I knew I forgot something...

6:00AM - when euphemisms run amok

Turning on the telly to check out the weather on the good channel (great, it'll be hot and sunny), there was an important story about Martinez. Last night there was a huge city council meeting for a vote about beavers. As the reporter stated, "passions remain strong on both sides of the issue". The entire segment took on a decidedly different meaning when interpreted euphemistically. The little boy talking about how beavers are nice and furry...

We now return you to your normal G-rated thoughts. (I so need to get my brain tuned up in the shop)

5:00AM - the eyeball of awakeness

In the past I have complained about waking up just minutes before the alarm clock rings. I've grown accustomed to that, and honestly, it was a mere irritant ("why did I buy an alarm if I'm going to wake up anyway?").

Waking up an hour and a half early because something is in your eye, you can't get it out, stumbling blindly towards the bathroom, flushing it out with water to no avail, turning on the light so you can see, attempting to adjust to the severe lighting change while not blinking.. now that's something to complain about. Especially when once adjusted to the light you can't really find anything in your eye.

And now I'm wide awake. *sigh*

Guess I can read more of "Java Concurrency in Practice", and look forward to having Korean for lunch. Mmm.. yuk gae jang...

3:00PM - and she rises!

Yet again I appeal to anyone with influence within Fox networks: give them a clue. Or a slap. This morning the anchor seemed almost in tears: the record price of crude oil was going to bring the market down no matter what.

Please. Almost every time she says that, she's full of it. Oil and energy are a large part of the stock market out there, and if costs go up, they get passed onto the consumer, with percentages skimmed off -- so of course the market will go up. I used to think the correlation was about 70%, but now I'm willing to raise that to 80%. Lo and behold! Just after opening, it went up a tiny bit. And by the end of trading today, all three major indexes out here are up by over 2%.

All I ask is for a wee bit of competen.. oh, wait. If they tell everyone the wrong thing, those people will lose money, and I'll gain. Never mind. That's a sneaky thing for them to do. See? All you who scoffed at me for watching Fox "news"? It's good for something after all.

2:00PM - red licorice

Every now and then someone brings in a big plastic jug of red licorice. Every now and then I succumb and think "oh, it couldn't have been as bad as I recall, I'll just try one and see".

The first thing that hits after opening the lid is a huge puff of smell which I can only describe as red. Intensely red. Snatching one piece and running away, the single piece is just mildly red in scent. Biting into it, I am reminded of the texture of rubber. Soft and chewable rubber, but rubber, and a faint reddish taste.

Ew. I may have created a new method for dieting: The Red Licorice Diet.

9:00AM - intelligent bus fares

Our local bus system has often done strange and bizarre things, but I wondered if a ten-ride local bus ticket ($1.75/ride) could be used twice to pay for a single transbay ride ($3.50/ride). Two separate bus drivers have confirmed that this is indeed allowed. This is a pleasant surprise.

I am still going to ask a third time. They may be different bus drivers, but they represent the same corporate entity. Corporations are bound by the laws of the fae, right?

I also discovered why people always say they're going to a drugstore to buy BART tickets, rather than going to the station that is five times closer. Turns out there are discounted tickets, if you are willing to purchase large denomination tickets. It is only 6% off, but if I take the subway into SF and back every day, it works out to about $80/year, which is somewhere between eight and thirty lunches (depending on what I eat).

9:00AM - bad signs

You know it's about time to reboot your Windows computer when zip files start showing up with an Excel icon, and when PKZip can't see any of your drives.

Sigh. I really didn't want to reboot and end up with IT-sponsored malware and spyware. Ah, well, I can always disable it...

Edit: it also doesn't help when I leave a non-bootable floppy in the drive, so after rebooting it says "NTLDR is missing". That freaked me out for a few seconds...

1:00PM - stupid smart pens

The tech segment of the news yesterday mentioned two smart pens that had come out last year, and both sounded interesting: Fly Fusion and LiveScribe. It had sounded like you just turned them on, used them as normal pens writing on paper, then plugged them into a USB port to upload what you had written. They have handwriting recognition, and can preserve certain areas as diagrams if you prefer. The LiveScribe would also record what was being said while you wrote things down, which is useless to me but would have been neat when I was a student.

Alas, it is not just any paper. You have to buy these special 160pg notebooks from them with microdots and bizarre glyphs. They cost around $8 per pad. Phooey.

I had thought this would be a neat way to do collaborative design at work and be able to easily get documents into the computer. But as I think about it more, it probably only works if you keep the pen close to the paper at all times, which is rarely done during design sessions because the pen gets passed around.

Phooey.

8:00AM - when you invite them in

There is talk in East Palo Alto, a (relatively) poor neighbourhood with a fair amount of crime (they used to be murder capitol of the US), about what to do to help the situation. The current suggestion is to allow police to go door to door and ask parents if they can search their kids' rooms for guns. If the parents consent, it acts much like a warrant to search.

On one hand, police are likely trained to know where to look and would do a better job, because the savvy kid has learned where parents tend to look and leave innocuous stuff "hidden" there. I know I did, although it sure wasn't guns.

On the other hand, inviting the police in voluntarily to search is kind of like inviting a vampire in. What if they notice something on the way to the rooms in question? Or find weed instead of guns? Should the parents decide to refuse entry, "obviously" there is something they are trying to hide, and you can be certain the police will return with a search warrant based on probable suspicion.

I'm against this solution. It takes needed police off the streets, and gives them unreasonable abilities to conduct searches. Instead, why not have the police teach closed-door lessons to groups of parents, pointing out likely hiding spots? Taped under furniture, behind a duct, in a shoe box that is strangely under stuff but looks scuffed, inside a rip in the mattress... As parents attend more and more, they might start to intuit where things might be hidden.

Just my nickel. (currency deflation)

11:00AM - daisy, daisy

Daisy, Daisy / Give me your answer, do
I'm half crazy / All for the love of you

I used to take quite short showers, feeling it was merely something one has to suffer through. Lately they have been longer and longer, as I find it a peaceful place to stand and let my mind wander.

Today, for some reason, the Daisy song popped into my head. The trouble was that I did not recall the next lines, but wanted some closure to the verse, so all sorts of various and silly things came into my mind for the following line:

We don't have any cherries / I must got pick some berries
I can't afford the ferry / I only have a penny
We mustn't have a baby / He might say "the libary"
I can't speak in trinary / I only do binary
You must not touch the baby / It is not sanitary

Those are the only ones I recall, although there are of course quite a lot more options available. But my favourite (and I will admit to trying for this one rather than having it just float into my head) would have been fun in the movie as a Greek chorus sort of thing:

You should not spy on Davey / It will drive you quite crazy

Addendum: my search for the actual lyrics revealed a study on robots which indicates that the more intelligent or amiable a machine seems to be, the more hesitation people show before turning it off. An interesting read.

5:00PM - quoted phrases as words

I wonder why nobody uses constructs like this:

If he didn't project such "I'm better than you, my time is more valuable"ness, he would be more fun to work with.

Okay, I can make a guess: it is particularly difficult to read, and unlike parenthetical comments it actually does flow within the content of the main outer sentence. But the quoted phrase is effectively an adjective, so the -ness suffix makes some sense to me.

Yes, I do think about these things, and no, I'm not about to make a habit out of utilizing such constructions. Very often. But one should experiment with language now and then.

4:00PM - unlikely happenings

There is a really long specification for a project I inherited just a while ago. I've opened this document maybe five times total over the last three months. Just now, I needed to find something out about a particular field, opened the 273 page document, grabbed the scrollbar, and guessed as to the offset within the document.

It was precisely the right page: 131.

Hopefully this is simply luck.

8:00AM - death by journal posting

I make just one lousy joking reference to the movie "The Ten Commandments", and what happens? Charlton Heston dies later on the same day. The odds of causation are practically zero, but the correlation is creepy.

*googles* Darn it, Bush didn't star in any movies. There goes that plan.

2:00PM - war of the bad sequels

There is apparently a War of the Worlds 2.

I am not certain whether I want to laugh, cry, or rant about such a thing. It is like making a movie called "The Next Ten Commandments".

11:00AM - Windows 7

There's a lot of talk around the next version of Windows (well, some talk), which is apparently codenamed Windows 7.

They might be able to go a long ways with that name. Think of the possible slogans: "Windows 7! Only 0.35% of the suckage of Windows 2000!".

(honestly, I like w2k well enough, but it would still be an amusing thing for them to say)

3:00PM - surplus items

While surfing around looking for data about some Crystal Reports settings, I stumbled across a public surplus auction web site.

Quick! If you live in Texas, you could buy a garbage truck for just under $9k. Be the envy of your neighbours! Blackmail the local garbage company by threatening to park your truck in reverse at 3am with that annoying *beep* *beep* *beep*. Take up sixteen parking spots when you go grocery shopping. Play chicken with SUVs!

There's also a P4/1.7GHz offered nearby for $37. Now, that's not a power machine, but still. For $37 it's a fine deal, especially if you are low on funds.

Interesting.