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how senior engineers are made...

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Seriously, wtf.
We never would have gotten free of leaded gas or paint if these were the assholes in charge.

via

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Ha, talk about optimism... Excel doesn't realize that if I ever use it it's absolutely not by purposeful choice.

Is it just me or does Putin look like a grown up Dewey from Malcolm in the Middle?

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600 Songs From 1990-1999 Remixed Into 34 Minutes #TimsTwitterListeningParty

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via twitter.com/dr_pangallo who says

"We're going to hear a lot of Republicans using the term "qualifications" to attack to Ketanji Brown Jackson's appointment to the Supreme Court, so I've put together a helpful graphic that should clarify what exactly Republicans mean when they say "qualification"..."

So, Melissa and I have been house hunting this winter, and seem to be on track (knock wood) for closing on a condo in Arlington next Thursday, and so will be moving in April.

Definitely aware of the privilege in being able to buy right now - I'm more lucky than good to have the resources to do this. (A possible downpayment kind of fell into my lap from my last company, and stumbling onto techie stuff as a career path in general - the 90s right before the first dot com thing - was also crazy good luck.)

But yeah, househunting is dedicating your weekends to an enormously stressful new hobby. It's a crazy contradiction - to do it well you have to deeply imagine yourself inhabiting a new place, cultivate an empathy for this future possible you. But you also shouldn't become too emotionally attached to that life in any one place, because if it's good chances are a dozen other folks are hankering for it too, and you probably won't get it.

I'm sort of proud of how I played the bidding (and getting a preinspection done so we could join this no-contingencies wild west) and Melissa was great at being a lot more detail oriented about the pluses and minuses of each place, I tended to hang back and just get the general feel.

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Someone Totally Ruined the Memory of PalmOS By Putting Twitter on It... heh.

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Sisyphus 2600! Now in physical form.
Lately I've been thinking of this scene from Clerks: Specifically, the mini-monolog:

I saw one, one time, that said 'the next week, the world is ending'. And in the next week's paper, they said 'we were miraculously saved at the zero hour by a Koala-Fish-Mutant-Bird'. Heheh, crazy shit.

So my employer just adopted an "everyone WFH 4 weeks" policy (there's a lot to unpack in a place where everyone can work from home - and in places where people can't.) And major universities are shifting into an online mode - (also a lot to unpack about traditional universities vs online learning...)

This is the first time in the Social Media age we're asked to achieve Social Distancing. 4 weeks WFH feels daunting, like a bad blizzard that keeps you home for a week, but for a month...

And if by chance it works well enough, that if we avoid Wuhan- and Northern-Italy levels of no more beds, no more ventilators... or even if it happens, but isn't widely reported - the naysayers are going to be this guy, accusing us of being tabloids.

But now is the time when we must become our own Koala-Fish-Mutant-Bird.

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Social distancing w/ Melissa in our 3rd Floor Walkup reminded me of this tweet from last fall:

I LOVE living on the top floor!! love to look out my window in my robe and scowl at the wretched earth

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If we all start working from home, we need to check in on the extroverts.

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I'm not saying that day 2 of Work-From-Home has given me full on cabin fever yet, but this thread dangling from a bit of laundry seemed AMAZING
why we type in lowercase. the other really effective bit is asking a question but leaving out the question mark. I have no idea if these are for a project or just riffing, but Paul Robertson is about my all time favorite pixel artist

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Relationship Status: This Girl made me laugh and laugh:

Relationship status : this girl. pic.twitter.com/AODDC5sN4g

— Adam Cole. (@Hamdttitude) March 10, 2018

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French Toast Alert System Some of my buddies seem to be relying on this (currently in prep for NOREASTERGEDDON 2018 III) and maybe it manages to be the supplement for weather stuff I've been looking for - just tell me as early as possible if something disruptive is foreseen...

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Hmm. Exercise can be a very effective way to treat depression. So why don't American doctors prescribe it? A few panoramic shots I might (or might not have?) missed from the Malaysia trip Melissa and I took last November.
All 3 are from KL, the first two from the KL, the last from my cousin's apartment building.

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Somehow it bums me out that I can't just watch TV and make good progress against my todo list.
Also: any advice for apartment hunting? Melissa and I are thinking about moving in this summer. I figure Craigs List has kind of degenerated a bit... I feel like I've had better luck with independent agencies but I don't have all that much experience with it.

Oh, the endless labor of the intellectual--pouring all this knowledge into the brain through a three-millimeter aperture in the iris.

Pretty great read! I forgot how plagued by physical ailments he was. Also, the flavor of old Vienna is great...

You can do what you want, but you can't want what you want.

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RIP Terry Pratchett. What a mind, and what a heart. The original of an old favorite... have some british cornball with your morning!

Tubas in the Moonlight
Playing for me all night
Tell me what I want to hear...
Am I only dreamin'?
Am I only schemin?
Stars above me,
shining brightly...
Why can't she be
sitting here beside me?
Tubas in the moonlight
Will bring my loved ones home

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If you look after truth and goodness beauty looks after herself.

(quoted in Edward Tufte's "Beautiful Evidence"- I'm attending a daylong seminar of his. He was impressed that for his lunch break "office hours" I used the technique he suggested for going to to the doctors: hand over a physical list of the things you'd ideally like to discuss while you look at a copy too (yay iPhone+iPad))

Nature has left this tincture in the blood, That all men would be tyrants if they could.

My company Alleyoop was in the Boston Globe this Sunday... and my little portrait is there, top row, second from left.



You know, that's not a bad picture of me.

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Full of nerdrage at the iOS or iTunes update making my "newly added music" "smart" playlist sort oldest first. What good is that?

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Daylight Savings makes walking around the streets of New England after work into a well lit chunk of heaven. Something I wrote recently to rile up the Libertarian types who frequent a private message boards I sometimes frequent

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_statutory_minimum_employment_leave_...

So of, like, all the Industrialized world, we're the one with no minimum leave.

I know the Conservative/Libertarian view is it should be left strictly as a negotiation between employer and employee, but the fact is the base line for what's "typical" is awfully low here, getting 3 weeks feels like a triumph, when with many other places it would below the minimum.

It also makes me think about "productivity". Increased productivity does correlate with higher unemployment, right? To some degree. Take it too far and it's worse for everyone. But a small company that's squeaking by with 3 employees doesn't want to higher a 4th til this all blows over...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time - when I hear about how bad Unions are, I think about the bumper sticker that points out it's what brought us to a 5 day, 40 hour working week. I value the 2 day weekend so much i can barely imagine life w/o it.

I think about this, from the great online mini graphic novel The Guy I Almost Was
http://www.electricsheepcomix.com/almostguy/

What I would be doing for a living? I didn't care. According to OMNI magazine, the technological changes of the Eighties were going to be so vast, so profound, that the job market would be unrecognizable by the time I entered the workforce.
Nearly any job I trained for now would be obsolete by 1990. Computers and solar-powered robot factories would be doing most of the work. Consumer goods would be mostly free, and the U.N. would be paying us all not to work.

And of course that's a fantasy. But why? If it could work like that, would it be better? Or at least splitting the difference?

Heh, Lex, maybe with your studies in Utopia/Dystopia, youi can tell me which that would be...

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Remember that the word "synesthesia" is spelled with a silent freshly mowed grass odor.

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if we fell in love in a forest would we make a sound?

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http://smilepanic.com/index.php/fun/34-crazy/483-moar.html - heh, picture of Mo's cat yawning from back in the day at the bottom of "MOAR!!!" page.



--The fight scenes from the Star Wars version of "Battle Chess", which was just chess with battle animations. They vibe reminds me a bit of that cartoon from the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special that introduced Boba Fett. (Heh... just noticed that that cartoon has Luke Skywalker in the "Y-Wing" rather than his usual X-Wing. I wonder if that was driven by the plot (having to fly with C3P0) or to sell toys of a ship that barely gets any screen time in the movie...))

BTW, I still <3 Youtube. It's crazy how much stuff you can find there.

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Starting out with OSX Leopard, wish I could see the "guided tours" for previous versions, in case there's something I missed.

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Things I didn't know had Wikipedia pages: 5 Second Rule, Go Faster Stripes, Buttocks (though a generic google search for "buttocks" brings up the wiki page for "buttock augmentation" earlier than that hit.)

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Think of the Trade Federation as a Galactic version of IKEA.

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http://siskoid.blogspot.com/2009/03/live-blog-of-doom.html - 2/3 down is an interesting "DC Comics Tarot"

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http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html - visualize a trillion. Frankly, most people don't even visual 30 or 40 very well. In 24 hours I'll be on a plane to Japan!

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Quote of the Moment

He had two choices. He could pretend that everything that had happened since the day of Lynch's murder had been a bad dream, forget it all, and set about rebuilding his life and his career like a sane, rational person. Or he could take a hand once again, play it out to its conclusion.

It was no choice at all, really. He felt like a moth that had just sighted the Great Chicago Fire.

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Passing of the Moment
D+D Inventor Gary Gygax died recently. Of all the geekish tributes I've seen tho him, only Slate points out that Dungeons and Dragons is a morally and creatively flawed travesty of a gaming system, that it really encouraged an idiotic "hack and slash" style that helped cement a kind of geek ghetto. AARGH! What's the one thing a cellphone's "Key Guard" should do? How about GUARD THE DAMN KEYS from registering presses?

Dang this makes me more angry than it should.
It's like phone designers have no common sense whatsoever.

I'm currently avoiding using a high-end PocketPC (for which I extended my contract with Sprint) because of a similar issue; it had a great big touchscreen, and the "key guard" was the power-off button. Which would have been great, had the phone not always been turning itself on to tell me about an alarm I set. Or some other alarm. Or no particular reason... thus giving me, or rather my pants, a reputation for calling people at odd intervals.

That's a personal and professional embarrassment, not to mention an annoyance for my friends, so I went back to my core principle of "I won't by a phone that's not a flip-phone" (with the keys safely inside the closed unit) and got a nice Sanyo Katana. It has volume buttons and a camera shutter on the outside, but it of course has a key guard. A key guard that goes away by the simple expedient of holding the volume button down. And then you're one convenient keypress away from doing a redial of the last number you called. So Matt had a nice conversation with and a fascinating voicemail from my pants.

WHAT WHERE THEY THINKING? I could see having a key-guarded key still turn off a ringing phone, because people want to do that in a hurry. But to design as if all accidental keypresses were just temporary little things? Do phone designers realize people have pockets, and sometimes people want to put their cellphone in their pocket? You'd think that would be somewhere in Cellphone Design 101... "people put cellphones in pockets". And then "Phones shouldn't make calls on their own accord".

To be fair I don't think this is going to happen very often with this phone, but still; this kind of blatant technological misdesign feels me with rage, just the sheer lunk-headedness of it, a proactive attempt to make things "better" (by including some weird-ass "I want to call the person I just talked to but I can't be arsed to actually, you know, open the phone") when the blatantly obvious thing to do, the logical default, would have been perfect and taken less work besides. It is so not the Right Thing (the caps are important)... it's the Anti-Right-Thing. I despair for the state of product design in general. (I've heard that Motorolas have a similar problem, except they'll cheerfully let you change the ringtone, and make it extra easy to turn it to "silence" with realizing it.)

Thanks for letting me vent...

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Quote and Political Sniping of the Moment

If you are not criticized, you may not be doing much.

This was the "Quote of the Day" on the Google startpage feature. I'm sure right-wingers take solace in this kind of thinking, but it kind of ignores its counterpoint "if you are being criticized, there's a chance you're doing way, way, way too much". Especially in the whole nation-invading and regime-changing business. Or, not giving generals the number of troops they think they'll need because of your misguided "new army" idea. Religion of the Moment

The final point in this very over-simplified discussion of Melachah is "psik raysha," meaning "cutting off the head." Background: To kill a living creature intentionally is considered a Melachah. But suppose, for example, that a parent, marooned on an island with only his son and a chicken, is being driven to distraction by his child on Shabbat. He decides that the only object that will serve as a toy for his child is the head of the chicken, and he proceeds to cut it off (pardon the unintentional grossness of the example) without any intention of killing the bird. Although it is possible to say that the element of "intention" is lacking here, the act nevertheless remains a Melachah, because experience has shown that it is quite impossible for the chicken to survive without its head.

I thought the quote was a little punchier without its followup "(although one does often encounter individuals who seem to be running around in that condition)"

Sounds like a difficult way to live...I also remember getting a "fences around the torah" explanation for why bottled water could use a kosher symbol... (FOLLOWUP FROM 2019: though in NYC tapwater contains tiny shrimp, maybe that would be a problem...)

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Video Game "Culture" of the Moment
I'm enjoying browsing through the Video Game Cameos & References database. This is President Ronnie from "Bad Dudes"... the NES version is winner of Seanbaby's best game intro list... "Did the secretary of defense stand up and say, 'We can't spare the military personel to rescue our president. So we'll just inspire a couple of street dudes to do it by questioning their badness. Easy.'"

Of course in the NES version it's George Bush senior, so...you see...I forgot where I was going with this. I guess Ronnie was just more photogenic.

--I didn't have much to say today so I thought I'd post a picture of my incredibly girly hammer. I know it's probably not pro-feminist of me to be so amused by a tool with lots of country-folksy flowers on it, but hey. It's a pretty useful, if not particularly heavy-duty tool, in that it also contains a set of 3 screwdrivers in the handle, both phillips and flathead.

Last night I decided to figure out what I needed for a party-able stereo system, using the iPod as the main music source...Mo took her receiver and better speakers, but it turns out that a combination of an iPod, my big TV as a stereo receiver, some old not-too-impressive AIWA shelf system speakers, and my surprisingly large subwoofer (once Christmas I asked for an "AIWA subwoofer", thinking I'd get the breadbox-sized piece I saw bundled with the newer AIWA systems, but she got me something the size of a medium-sized microwave) puts out a decent amount of noise and should be quite adequate for a party. I figure I'll be all cool, and have a DVD or videogame on just for the pictures, both for the random funkness as well as making sure the TV doesn't shut itself off.

I'm no audiophile, but I get a kick out of putting together a danceable stereo system out of spare parts.

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Music of the Moment
Speaking of random music, the front page of ghetto-blaster.com has some cool little electronica riffs.

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Anecdote of the Moment

While transporting mental patients from Harare to Bulawayo, the bus driver stopped at a roadside shebeen (beerhall) for a few beers. When he got back to his vehicle, he found it empty, with the 20 patients nowhere to be seen. Realizing the trouble he was in if the truth were uncovered, he halted his bus at the next bus stop and offered lifts to those in the queue. Letting 20 people board, he then shut the doors and drove straight to the Bulawayo mental hospital, where he hastily handed over his 'charges', warning the nurses that they were particularly excitable. Staff removed the furious passengers; it was three days later that suspicions were roused by the consistency of stories from the 20. As for the real patients: nothing more has been heard of them and they have apparently blended comfortably back into Zimbabwean society.

Take stories like this with a grain of salt, but man...that is such a brilliant idea.

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Article of the Moment
Slate.com on the Military's upcoming gadgets. Some cool stuff in there!

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T-Shirt of the Moment

Jane models the T-shirts I'll be bundling with JoustPong at PhillyClassic next weekend! I think they came out very well. Josh at Salisbury Sales let me make a batch of 60 for a *great* price...I'd recommend them. Custom T-shirts are fun!

Zinger of the Moment

As far as I'm concerned, war always means failure.

As far as France is concerned, you're right.

You know, I really do have respect for some of the French attitude on this--though I know they're also looking out for their own economic interests--but these jokes are really fun, if not 100% justified. But "Freedom Fries" and "Freedom Toast" are the dumbest things I've heard of in a long while. What is this, third grade?

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Rant of the Moment
The USA has been taken over by non-human life forms. I really think it has a point, and it's fascinating in both theoretical and all-too-practical ways. Corporations are artificial life, and they're potentially immortal and very very smart. The Wikipedia has more on Corporate Personhood--it is an odd idea.

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Comic of the Moment
I haven't had many fun links lately. This one's pretty cool (and a quick read), Porn Again, where a Cleveland Boy relates is history of and justification for his enjoyment of porn. Quote of the Moment

THE QUESTIONS MAY CHANGE--BUT BY GOD, OUR ANSWERS STAY THE SAME!

Man, with what I've been reading about how we're preparing to deal with Iraq, I believe this is the Republican slogan...we really seem convinced that we have the right to kick out Saddam. And damn the consequences!

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Link of the Moment
Miserable Melodies has some of the wrongest music on the web. Has some classics like William Shatner covering "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and Richard Harris doing "MacArthur Park" (one my favorites from jazzband actually) as well as some lesser known performances. Go to the "All by Artist" page and be sure to check out the "Portsmouth Sinfonia"..."Sin" is about the right way to describe their cover of "Also Sprach Zarathustra"....

The Miserable Melodies site actually ties in to today's theme of "Republican Madness", because it features John Ashcroft singing this song he penned himself:

Let the eagle soar,
Like she's never soared before.
From rocky coast to golden shore,
Let the mighty eagle soar.
Soar with healing in her wings,
As the land beneath her sings:
'Only god, no other kings.'
This country's far too young to die.
We've still got a lot of climbing to do,
And we can make it if we try.
Built by toils and struggles
God has led us through.

"This country's far too young to die"?? That's a reckless teenager line if I ever heard it. And this rendition gives him the benefit of the doubt, but I swear he thinks the the past tense of "soar" is "soarn". Did you know each time he has been sworn in to political office, he has himself anointed with cooking oil (in the manner of King David, as he points out in his memoirs).
(lyrics thanks to barking moose, thanks Bill for the oil link. And actually, you can see the CNN video that the music was lifted from.) Real Life Quote of the Moment

"Self-medication with alcohol is generally a bad idea"

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Cartoon Quote of the Moment

Dirt doesn't need luck.

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Something In-between Quote of the Moment

Question: If you could live forever, would you and why?
Answer: I would not live forever, because we should not live forever, because, if we were supposed to live forever, then we would live forever, which is why I would not live forever.

The scary thing is, I think she's kind of right.