John Stracke: they called me MAD at the commitment hearing!

Kid quote

Fri, 25 Dec 2009 17:00:00 GMT

"How are we going to keep [toddler] from chewing on my noses?"

Random thought

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 14:23:39 GMT

Pity the kid whose parents named him Homer in 1989.

OK, time to stop doing business with Consumer Reports

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 16:53:46 GMT

We used to subscribe to Consumer Reports in paper. Around 1999, the Web version became available, and we switched to that for a while. We didn't use it too much, though, so we let it lapse around...2002? A couple of times since then, we've needed their data for some particular purchase, so we signed up for a year.

Now, they've pretty much always sent some demispam, usually ads for gift subscriptions and so forth. This year, though, they crossed the line: an ad for gift subscriptions with a Subject: line of "Time Sensitive Information From Consumer Reports". This is full-fledged spam: an ad with a Subject: line designed to trick me into opening it.

I used their Web site to unsubscribe, and included a note telling them this was unacceptable. That was last Thursday the 10th. (Edit: to unsubscribe from their email messages.)

Today I got a message from them with the Subject: line, "Follow-up Notification From Consumer Reports". I thought they might be acknowledging the unsubscribe demand...but no, it's another ad for gift subscriptions.

So. They've sent me multiple versions of the same misleading ad, and ignored my demand to unsubscribe. They are spammers. Time to consign Consumer Reports to the outer darkness.

If you see the hills coming, run the other way!

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 21:28:06 GMT

"The Bard's Exhortation to the Salaryman" is less cheering when there's ice on the ground and the sun went down at 4:12.

Sigh.

Lovecraft foolishness

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 20:20:56 GMT

I've been reading Lovecraft, and I found a particularly odd bit in "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath". The protagonist has been captured by some nasty flying things, and struggles to get away. Now, this is dumb enough (does he want to fall?), but what the nasties do next is dumber.

They tickle him.

What the hell was Lovecraft thinking? Did he neglect to mention that his protagonist was a member of a rare human subspecies, Homo sapiens titillandus, which struggles less when tickled?

So high, so low, so many things to know

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 13:03:20 GMT

I'm playing around with parsing a dump of Wikipedia, and I'm digging through the description of their (rather chaotic) syntax for citations. There are a lot of domain-specific identifiers (ISBN just doesn't cut it), and I just learned that a PubMed ID is a unique integer assigned to articles in the life sciences. They started at 1; as of 2005, they were up to 15 million and something.

For some reason, this is making me tear up.

Resistance to H1N1

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:36:56 GMT

This morning Ars Technica covered an interesting paper on why some people have partial resistance to this year's H1N1 variant, S-OIV, without having been exposed to it. Short answer: there's resistance because some of the epitopes (characteristic proteins) are also present in seasonal flu; it's only partial because those proteins are on the inside of the virus, so only the T-cells see them; the B-cells don't.

It also has an interesting historical tidbit:

It turns out that, prior to 1957, more seasonal flu variants shared epitopes with S-OIV. There was a flu pandemic in 1957 that seems to have pushed these strains off the scene, meaning that younger individuals are less likely to have a well-primed immune system, at least from the H1N1/S-OIV perspective.

Cambridge scenery

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 20:39:39 GMT

From the window of ITA's cafeteria, I can see four separate buildings with solar panels on the roofs.

(None of these appear to be MIT buildings, either. They're ordinary low-rise apartment buildings.)

Simple Cheese

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 23:19:25 GMT

cvirtue brought out the parmesan tonight, which our kids refer to as "shaker cheese", and tossed out the idea of a song to the tune of "Simple Gifts". So I came up with this:

'Tis the cheese that is grated,
'Tis the cheese that's a treat,
'Tis the cheese we pour on what we want to eat.
And when we pour it out on the food just right,
'Twill be on the pasta of love and delight.

When grated parmesan is served,
We all shall get as much as we deserve.
To pour, pour will be our delight,
'Till by pouring, pouring, our food tastes right.

(Edited: "ground parmesan" instead of "parmesan cheese"; not quite accurate, but puts the stress on the right syllable.)

(Edited again: "grated parmesan".)

Onion: Man Dies After Secret 4-Year Battle With Gorilla

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:12:32 GMT

"I noticed that David had lost a lot of weight over the past couple of months, especially when he came in with his arm torn off,"

Seen from the train

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 11:42:02 GMT

I just spotted a truck labelled "Seafood Express". Ah, yes, the less successful alternative to the Pony Express.

Google Does What I Mean

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:51:51 GMT

I just needed to search for something about regular expressions. Without really thinking about it, I gave Google a string including "regexp", which is a common abbreviation for "regular expression"—the other common one being "regex". At the bottom of the page, I found this note:

Tip: These results include the word "regex". Show results that include only "regexp".

Google knows that "regexp" and "regex" are synonyms. I love it.

The battery blues

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:42:12 GMT

My Gateway laptop is 3 years old now. When I bought it, its battery life was about 2 hours. As recently as a year ago, it was long enough that I could use it on the train both to and from work, and not have to charge it during the day. Now, it's just barely enough to last one way.

So yesterday I started looking for a new battery. I found some good options, but, along the way, I also found a Gateway manual that mentioned that shortened battery life was sometimes due to miscalibration, and explained how to have the laptop recalibrate the battery. OK, I thought, I'll try that; maybe I won't have to spend $90.

The calibrator takes several hours, and the laptop needs to be plugged in, so I put it off until I got to work today. A while ago, it finally finished, and announced that it had its numbers. It had previously believed the battery capacity was 2090 mAh (down from 4400 mAh). Now it knows that was wrong; the actual capacity is 1894 mAh.

Sigh. You were supposed to figure out how to get more energy out of the battery, not less!

The Meme and Bucket Dance

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:36:58 GMT

Copied from martianfencer, with custom stuff added the way she did:

Place an X by all the things you've done and remove the X from the ones you have not.

Things you have done during your lifetime:

(x) Gone on a blind date (a couple of times, by answering personal ads)
(x) Gave blood
(x) Skipped school
( ) Watched someone die
(x) Been to Mexico
(x) Been to Florida
( ) Been to Hawaii
(x) Been on a plane
(x) Been on a helicopter (flying over the Grand Canyon)
(x) Been lost
(x) Gone to Washington, DC
(x) Ridden in a police car
( ) Hugged a homeless person
(x) Swam in the ocean
( ) Swam with stingrays
( ) Been sailing in the ocean
(x) Cried yourself to sleep
(x) Played cops and robbers
(x) Recently colored with crayons
( ) Ran a marathon
( ) Sang Karaoke
( ) Volunteered at a soup kitchen
(x) Paid for a meal with coins only (yes, but not as some sort of symptom of poverty—when I used to go to Pennsic, I would bring dollar coins)
( ) Been to the top of the St. Louis Arch
( ) Seen the northern lights (I wish)
( ) Been para sailing
(x) Been on TV
(x) Done something you told yourself you wouldn't
( ) Made prank phone calls
( ) Been down Bourbon Street in New Orleans
(x) Laughed until some kind of beverage came out of your nose (does spaghetti count?)
( ) Fed a Giraffe
( ) Caught a snowflake on your tongue
( ) Fired a gun
( ) Danced in the rain
(x) Been to the opera
(x) Written a letter to Santa Claus
(x) Serenaded someone
( ) Seen a US President in person
(x) Been kissed under the mistletoe (well, yeah, but there was nothing significant about it; it was at my father's side of the family's Christmas)
(x) Watched the sunrise with someone (again, the "with someone" didn't have any romantic significance; it was at a dance marathon in college)
( ) Driven a race car
(x) Been to a National Museum
( ) Been to a wax museum
( ) Eaten caviar
(x) Blown bubbles
(x) Gone ice-skating (yes, but not well)
(x) Gone to the movies
( ) Been deep sea fishing
( ) Driven across the United States
(x) Been in a hot air balloon
( ) Been sky diving
( ) Gone snowmobiling
( ) Lived in more than one country (the longest I've been out of the US is about a month)
( ) Lay down outside at night and admired the stars while listening to the crickets
( ) Seen a falling star and made a wish
( ) Enjoyed the beauty of Old Faithful Geyser
(x) Seen the Grand Canyon
(x) Seen the Statue of Liberty (from a distance)
( ) Gone to the top of Seattle Space Needle
(x) Been on a cruise
(x) Traveled by train
( ) Traveled by motorcycle
( ) Been horse back riding (well, I sat on a pony for a little bit on my third birthday...and had to stop because I was scared)
(x) Ridden on a San Francisco CABLE CAR
(x) Been to Disneyland/Disney world
(x) Been in a rain forest (Muir Woods is a rain forest, right?)
(x) Seen whales in the ocean
(x) Been to Niagara Falls
(x) Ridden on an elephant
( ) Swam with dolphins
( ) Been to the Olympics
( ) Walked on the Great Wall of China
( ) Saw and heard a glacier calf
( ) Been spinnaker flying
( ) Been water-skiing
(x) Been snow-skiing (cross-country)
( ) Been to Westminster Abbey (I've been outside it)
(x) Been to the Louvre
( ) Swam in the Mediterranean (I stepped up to touch it before heading back from the business trip...and a wave came by and I was stuck wearing wet socks all the way back to California)
(x) Been to a Major League Baseball game
( ) Been to a National Football League game
( ) Swam with sharks
( ) Been White Water Rafting
( ) Written a book or screen play
( ) Been to a Tournament of Roses Parade
(x) Lived in more than one state
(x) Become a parent
( ) Been Bungee Jumping
( ) Been to Vegas (unless connecting at the airport counts :-)
(x) Been to a minor league baseball game
(x) Worked on a political campaign (slightly: I volunteered for Jackson in 1988, until I read his platform and decided he was a loony)
( ) Been to the top of the World Trade Center or Empire State Building (Hmpf. New York chauvinism. I've been to the top of the Sears Tower and the CN Tower, both of which are taller.)
(x) Ridden a Subway
( ) Been to your High School Reunion

And my custom stuff:
(x) Seen an alligator in the wild
(x) Saw someone I knew in the hotel in a foreign country (randomly, that is; people I'm travelling with, or people going to the same conference, don't count)
( ) Earned a Ph.D. (I'd like to, but it's just too impractical. I got my MS because I didn't know enough theory; a Ph.D. wouldn't add enough to that, except in the narrow field of my dissertation.)
( ) Published a work of fiction
( ) Stepped on another planet
(x) Visited a meteor crater
(x) Attended a scientific conference
(x) Spoken at a scientific conference (a 5-minute lightning talk)
( ) Published a scientific paper
(x) Petted a dolphin
(x) Been to Australia
(x) Seen redwoods
(x) Written an OS
(x) Written a video game
(x) Published an Internet-Draft
( ) Published an RFC
(x) Cofounded a company
( ) ...which got funding
( ) ...which eventually turned a profit
(x) Published some fonts (both Fedora and Debian now include them!)
( ) Built a robot
(x) Taught a class
(x) Seen people taking down the Berlin Wall.

Very Bad Interface Ideas

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:49:50 GMT

Bruce Tognazzini has designed an improved app management UI for the iPhone. Apparently, the current UI (a) has a hard limit of 180 apps, and (b) offers no good way to organize them. In the latest version of the OS, Apple provides a solution for this: you can search for apps, and you can have "invisible" apps that don't show up in the list, so they don't count against your 180-app limit.

However, if you search for an app, you have to know its name. The example he gives is that the AAA app isn't called "AAA"; it's called "Roadside".

In other words, it's a command line. They've taken a Unix kernel, put a gorgeous UI on top of it, gotten people to go, "ooh, ahh, pretty, here's my money"...and then discovered that their UI is so limited that it needs a command line after all.

Acronym confusion

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 18:19:42 GMT

Every airline has a two-letter ID, assigned by IATA (er, International Air Transport Association). As you'd expect, the bigger, older airlines have IDs that are more or less recognizable, such as AA for American Airlines and NW for Northwest.

People at ITA generally refer to airlines by ID—most often in writing, but sometimes in speech, too. I'm used to this by now, and mostly do the same.

But I can't hear Continental's ID without thinking "carbon monoxide".

GIP: Princess Mozilla

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 15:31:10 GMT

A picture of Mozilla wearing a feathery tiara, sitting on my phone at work.

Oh, you want the explanation?

First: I have a Mozilla doll because I bought one when I was working at Netscape.

Second: Mozilla is at work because I rescued it from the most recent culling of stuffed animals.

Third: Mozilla is on my phone because it was a good way to get it out of the way and still visible. (I almost never get calls on that phone.)

Fourth: I have a cheap feathery tiara because ITA used to do Casual Princess Fridays; at lunch, they'd give us these to wear. (It hasn't happened in six months or so, presumably because the company's started getting more careful about money.)

Fifth: Mozilla is wearing the tiara because it was in the way, and, well, it just looks silly.

The Onion: Cat Congress Mired in Sunbeam

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 19:41:01 GMT

Microfilk

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 11:15:17 GMT

The butterflies come out to play,
On Chrysalis Day, Chrysalis Day,
The butterflies come out to play,
On Chrysalis Day in the morning!

And Puff, that mighty dragon, sadly slipped into his cave

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 12:12:24 GMT

Just happened to see an obituary over someone's shoulder: Mary Travers, of Peter, Paul, and Mary, has died at 72.

Sigh. I could have seen them back in college; they played every year at the Ravinia folk festival. But it was always too much effort, or I remembered too late, or something. Now it's just too late.

Mad library science

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 23:40:57 GMT

Yesterday A. brought home a book that he said was recommended by his library specialist at school. It was The Butter Battle Book. Did they even realize it was about mutual assured destruction?

Review: Barbie and the Three Musketeers

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 14:30:02 GMT

Yesterday I took E to the discount kids' movie, which was showing Barbie and the Three Musketeers. I was expecting to hate it, of course, but it was actually fairly good.

Barbie is Carinne, who starts out homologous to D'Artagnan: a relatively poor Gascon who comes to Paris to be a Musketeer, with a letter of introduction to M. Treville. Everybody she sees says girls can't be Musketeers, except M. Treville, who just tells her he can't make her a Musketeer unless she proves herself first.

Carinne goes off dejected into the streets, makes three enemies, accidentally gets a job as a maid at the palace, and discovers her coworkers are the three enemies. She winds up making friends and moving in with them, not in that order. A while later, it turns out that all four of them want to be Musketeers; they train in secret, get fired, foil a plot to assassinate the Crown Prince, and become Musketeers.

It's all as plausible as a lemon meringue anvil, but it's quite a positive story. The four girls are not of Barbie proportions, they don't get rescued by men, and they don't go mooning after boys.

The historical accuracy was stuffed away in a box, of course. The servants don't live in the palace; instead, they share an enormous apartment in town, with high ceilings, four-poster beds, and vast tracts of window glass. Nobody has smallpox scars, servants don't get beaten, and nobody is shocked that Carinne is wearing pants. Oh, and the Crown Prince is inventing the balloon.

The animation is pretty mediocre; the humans are oversimplified and have very wooden facial expressions. I'm not sure, but I expect a decent videogame these days could do better. And there were severe digital artifacts in places—e.g., a rippling effect every time we pan past a tile roof. I suspect it wasn't meant to be viewed on the big screen; it seemed like they just took a DVD and projected it.

But it was fun. E. wants to learn swordfighting now.

Suspicion

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 13:37:16 GMT

This morning's xkcd:

It left me singing that Bee Gees song, "More than a spambot! More than a spambot to me."

Oh, and for those who can't see the mouseover, it's: Fine, walk away. I'm gonna go cry into a pint of Ben&Jerry's Brownie Batter(tm) ice cream [link], then take out my frustration on a variety of great flash games from PopCap Games(r) [link].

All these turkeys on the road

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 11:38:31 GMT

...and I'm not talking about drivers. This morning, as I came around a bend in the road, I spotted three turkeys just standing there. In the other lane, fortunately.

This was on Mill Rd. in Chelmsford.

The Smug Parent

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 19:38:16 GMT

During our vacation to Maine last week, we took a side trip to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. Do Not Try This At Home. Yarmouth may not be the most boring place I've visited, but it's pretty bad. Better than Calais, worse than Dover.

We stayed overnight; in the morning, E was pretty cranky about the dullness. After a while, though, I had an idea. We were in a park. There was a gazebo in the park. And both our kids know The Tale of Eric and the Dread Gazebo. So I invented the traditional test of bravery, Taunt The Gazebo.

I started them off with, "Gazebo, you're so puny, you couldn't even kill a sick kobold with one hit point!", and A echoed with, "Stupid gazebo!". E was a little stubborn, but soon she was offering her own insults. Then she thought of stomping on the gazebo. Stomp, stomp, stomp.

But it really took off when cvirtue suggested that they needed to make the gazebo dizzy, by running around it in circles really fast. By the time they were done, we had achieved victory over the grump. Smug, smug, smug.