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Melissa and I had to say goodbye to our dear kitty Dean today - (given his medicine regimen over the past few years we weren't taken unawares but the speed of decline this past week and then this last day were a shock.)

He was such a sweet and snuggly cat. Melissa was thinking of a younger female cat when she first went to the shelter but Dean The Love Machine's (the shelter's nickname for him) head boop was irresistible.

And he was brave! Fellow cat people were impressed by how out and about he was when we had folks over for my birthday...

So here are some photos. I think the biggest compliment we had as his Humans was when someone pointed how relaxed a cat he must be, showing his belly to the world like that in this one photo...

(title is a little riff on a "hello friend" greeting Melissa often used for Dean) Reread Cat's Cradle, first on a list of this All Vonnegut Novel suggested reading order. It remains one of my favorite books, and I want to make it clear, I want the Bokononist Final Rites read at my funeral, at least up to "Good Night!".

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We watched the Laboratory's receptionist turn on the many educational exhibits that lined the foyer's walls. The receptionist was a tall, thin girl--icy, pale. At her crisp touch, lights twinkled, wheels turned, flasks bubbled, bells rang.

"Magic," declared Miss Pefko.

"I'm sorry to hear a member of the Laboratory family using that brackish, medieval word," said Dr. Breed. "Every one of those exhibits explains itself. They're designed so as *not* to be mystifying. They're the very antithesis of magic."

"The very what of magic?"

"The exact opposite of magic."

"You couldn't prove it by me."

Dr. Breed looked just a little peeved. "Well," he said, "we don't *want* to mystify. At least give us credit for that."

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And the driver asked me if I would mind another brief detour, this time to a tombstone salesroom across the street from the cemetery.

I wasn't a Bokononist then, so I agreed with some peevishness. As a Bokononist, of course, I would have agreed gaily to go anywhere anyone suggested. As Bokonon says: "Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God."

I think of that line "Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God" to help justify saying yes all the time - I was glad to be reminded that it applies not just to big journeys but small side trips as well.

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'Americans are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.'

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An evening at Revere Beach, and then some of Cora's lil chicks. Weird dream where our kitty Dean was looking kind of big and woobly and then gave birth to a pair of small terriers.

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I've always loved that moment when someone shows you the thing they built for tracking books they've read or for their jewelry business. Amateur software is magical because you can see the seams and how people wrestled the computer. Like outsider art. So much of the tech industry today is about making things look professional, maybe convincing Apple to let you into the App Store to join the great undifferentiated mass of other apps. That's software. When people build their own Airtable to feed the neighborhood, that's culture.
[...]
I get asked a lot about learning to code. Sure, if you can. It's fun. But the real action, the crux of things, is there in the database. Grab a tiny, free database like SQLite. Import a few million rows of data. Make them searchable. It's one of the most soothing activities known to humankind, taking big piles of messy data and massaging them into the rigid structure required of a relational database. It's true power. Or mess around with Airtable or its no-code ilk. If you do it long enough and work with friends, you can do wonderful things. You can build data models that work well enough to feed people who need the help. That's real programming.

I think about something I heard about how in the 90s you could make a decent little business setting up little MS Access databases with custom Visual Basic front ends for small companies.

I've seen some of this with people using Google Docs and Google's survey tool - also I've seen some neat homebrew efforts for various Porchfests that often rival the results I've put into my sites for 'em, but took a lot less background knowledge.

I know I've gotten great utility out of a little Perl DB (later PHP, and overdue for a front end makeover) I made - just rows and columns and a customizable form, like a less-fancy, more functional Excel. I've made dozens of tables in it but mostly I use it record media I consume, coworkers I want to keep in touch with, and lately to assemble my monthly playlists.

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Everything is habit-forming, so make sure what you do is what you want to be doing.

Twenty years ago (yeesh) My friend Paul M. recruited me to my first post-college job at a company called IDD. When we were there, he did me the honor of recording some of the oddball things I would say (this list has been languishing on a biography in lists page I made way back when - I can tell it's old because all of my html tags are in all caps...)

1. Get the friggin' integer ass. (said to the Java compiler)
2. Well, I sure hope I get to New York tonight. (sigh) - Fuck a duck, fuck a duck, fuck a duck duck duck
3. Hang on while I stamp out a nipple (while brandishing a hammer)
4. I gotta read that sex book ("Sex", the 1992 coffeetable book by Madonna)
5. You fish and chips snarfelling waffler. (said to Paul, born in England).
6. Ah, shoot off a nipple. Ooh. That would hurt. (said while pointing a gun at Paul's chest.)
7. If libertarian ideals are so great, how come we use the English measurement system?
8. Kirk: But Paul, I want to be a hero-- Paul: Yeah, but you don't want to be marketing's hero
9. I want to have an artgasm.
10. I wish I knew how to sing Lawrence Welk music.
11. These bubbles make me happy as a little girl.
12. I'd come crawling back to her in a minute if I thought I had a third of a chance.
13. Wanna smell a nut?
14. Don't threaten me. Don't threaten my manhood.
15. (answering phone) Magic NetGravity Fairy
16. That nail is an extension of me. You touched me!
17. Lawrence Welk really had the right idea.
18. I'm a software developer- I don't need shoes.
19. Now my wrists are gonna get all sore.
20. The reason that dogs chase cars is that they think they are giant buffalo and they want to herd them- or something.

Sometime in mid-2008 I started compiling a similar list of my idiosyncratic phrases

"( )"

I tend to talk parenthetically, in that I will start a statement and go immediately off into a parenthetical aside, usually a disclaimer or recognition of an alternate interpretation. This is often very confusing for the listener. e.g. "So I was thinking (and I'm not saying this is what we have to do, but it has worked pretty well in the past) we should take Amtrak rather than drive there."

"*grumblesmurf*"

An under-the-breath exclamation of discontent

"I was more struck by ____"

When I want to point out what aspect most stood out for me without dismissing the other parts.

"a little disjoint"

my favorite expression for some art work that just doesn't hang together very well

"dudely!"

Emphatic form of "dude", often connotating pleasant surprise. absorbed from mo.

"one option you might want to consider is..."

a typical prelude when suggesting a "helpful hint" to my mom or my aunt when helping them with their respective computer... trying to balance my urge to make things better with an understanding that people often like to keep things the way that they are used to.

"sister"

When I'm playfully frustrated or irritated with a female friend, I tend to call them sister... I think it comes from Han Solo's line in Star Wars, "It is for *me*, sister."
This bugged Ksenia very much.

"that's some of what it comes back to"

discussing a root cause while acknowledging the best explanations are multifaceted

"whatever you say me"

A bit of russlish Ksenia used once or twice, dropping the "to" from "say to me". I still use it as a form of grudging consent, as I did then to tease her a bit

Interesting to see which phrases I still use. I still like "you fish and chips snarfelling waffler", I definitely have too many parenthetical asides, and I like saying "*grumblesmurf*"

(I know it seems a bit self-absorbed to record and share this stuff, but if it helps I think everyone should be that kind of self-absorbed...)

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okay so today the president said jews are stupid and got mad when he couldn't buy greenland

What a ridiculous clusterfuck of totally uncool jokers.

She points out what a fine above-the-mud response this is to many situations. The clip I didn't know I needed: Cookie Monster meets Animal:

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making the rounds...
I know it's old news but I hadn't thought about Trumps "2nd Amendment People" joke and Yitzhak Rabin's assassination; words matter. (Of course, it goes the villainization has gone both ways, and Trump had his would be assassin as well, but at least there the jokey suggestions aren't coming from the top.)

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Starring the Computer is a delightfully nerdy survey of real world computers showing up in various shows and movies. (From this article about a guy who made a replica of the Burroughs B205, as seen in Lost in Space, Batman, and elsewhere)

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I missed this Usain Bolt Photo but it's brilliant. via

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The History of the Pencil. Man is that top of the image page mesmerizing! If I was Scottish, "The Church of Kirk" would be redundant.

I can neither confirm nor deny rumors that I am trying to start such an organization.

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(repost from FB) WE'RE IN DEMAND BABY!

and we know how to punch above our (considerable) weight. Musically speaking. Dead at Noon. Gillian Bennett elected to end her life rather than give into an inevitable slide into dementia. She tells her story and makes her argument elegantly on a website published after her death. This day we took a boat tour of Glacier Bay on the Good Ship St. Phillip (A "Jet Powered Catamaran", technically.) None of the wildlife photos really came out, but there were sea lions, eagles, mountain goats, whales, and lots of interesting birds including puffins.

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Scalia is a disgusting troll, a "strict originalist" only when it's convenient to him and people like him. Disgraceful. (Another good view on this kind of strict constructionism )

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Fun Quora about common knowledge at your place, astonishing everywhere else The Software Engineering one wasn't 100% right, but wasn't too far off.
--Forget where I saw this...

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There are more important things in life than winning; such as not being a jerk.

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So, does Arthur the cartoon character grow into Arthur the Dudley Moore character, or what? Just kinda liked this thing from cracked.com...

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Great film makers know how to give us lines to read between.

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https://www.youtube.com/user/CeeLoGreen#p/u/2/CAV0XrbEwNc - Gnarls Barkley returns with an F U kinda song...

I've been thinking about the Logo design of the some of the toy lines of my youth. (The best image of most of these online seemed to have black backgrounds, so I'm experimenting with colors here.) Arguably, the most notable was Transformers, Autobots vs Decepticons:      (Despite their being kind of silly summer fare, Amber found the Transformers movie grabbing enough that she wanted an Autobot sticker for her car- but she didn't grow up with this stuff, so she had to double check that she was getting the right one. I had kind of assumed it was "obvious", the good guys have a softer, rounder kind of mask face, the bad guys are more sharp and wicked and pointy, and there might be some intuition to it, but only once you know what to look for.) The toys all sported the badges of their particular faction, and for a while it was good, but then they added these "rub stickers", kind of heat sensitive, that were more or less opaque 'til touched. That would have been ok I guess (if a little non-sensical story-wise) but unlike normal stickers, the rub stickers were in grey boxes which were an aesthetic mess on otherwise cool robot toys. (I guess Hasbro wanted something for its toys that the knock-offs couldn't have.) Arguably the very coolest logo of the 80s was for the G.I Joe bad guys, Cobra: I've seen that as a tattoo. (and then of course there was the time they teamed up with the Transformers bad guys:) Weirdly G.I Joe itself didn't have much good logo work going on - maybe a traditional US military star, or sometimes the whole name of the group (what's that kind of logo called, when its just a stylized rendition of the name of the thing?) (Of course in the cartoon, there was also the "audio logos", G.I. Joe's rallying call of "Yo Joe!" and Cobra's warcry "COOOBRAAAAAAAAAAA!") I've seen this one floating around, I don't know if it is new for the movie or what: Also, there's this modernization of the old name-as-logo: Actually this page was kind of inspired when I read up on Cobra Commander's ally Destro, remembered how he's always sort of had his own organization, and wondered if they had a logo. I found this: A little heavy handed, but not bad. I'd argue that even back in the day this kind logo work set G.I.Joe and Transformers apart from some of the other toy lines. Like, compare some of this cool iconic stuff to johny-come-lately MASK: It just seems so pedestrian. Hasbro (or whoever) kept up the canonical mask idea for later toylines, like in "Beast Wars" where it was Maximals vs Predacons:      I don't think I have to tell you who was good and who was bad...

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http://daringfireball.net/2009/08/the_android_opportunity - Can Android be saved? I worry the AppStore might make iPhone's early lead even tougher to overcome because people come to rely on specific apps. Lately I've been hearing a lot of "this might be a dumb question, but..." usually responded to with the usual trite reassurance "there is no such thing as a dumb question." Depending on the audience, I'll sometime lapse into the shtick from demotivators "There are no stupid questions, but there are a LOT of inquisitive idiots."

I don't know why I find the "no such thing" assurance mildly grating. I find it a bit gratuitous I guess, especially since someone being smart enough to recognize and label a potentially obvious or otherwise lacking question as such is probably clever enough to not need the uplift... or if they do, this ain't gonna be it.

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Quote of the Moment

Personally, I always claim Cecil Earl is a little screwy, or if he is not screwy that he will do very well as a pinch-hitter until a screwy guy comes up to bat.

(From one of the stories that inspired the musical "Guys and Dolls".) I keep paraphrasing this quote, badly. I just love it as a dodge, where you can't quite call a spade a spade, but that thing certainly is exhibiting some spade-like qualities.

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Not only did Olympic rules mandate skimpier outfits for beach volleyballers (SRSLY!) the gold final added a critical "wet t-shirt" dimension

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Don't know if it was the dentist or all company conference call (both harmless) this morning but I'm jittery as hell over lunch.

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"Only WHO Can Prevent Forest Fires? [...] You Pressed YOU, Meaning Me. That Is Incorrect. The Correct Answer Is ME, Meaning You." The whole idea that the king is never actually captured in chess smacks of monarchism, some kind of kowtowing to the idea of the Divine Right. I'm almost surprised France or the United States didn't come up with some variation that made a big point of removing the king from the board as loudly and obnoxiously as possible.

There's that Italian proverb, "After the game, the king and pawn go into the same box." A nicely egalitarian thought, but one that doesn't really hold up as it applies metaphorically to people... the pawn goes into a plane pine box if that, and the king goes into some kind of ornate mausoleum, and beyond that concrete difference, the pawn is likely anonymous and forgotten after a few decades, while the king's legacy lives on one way or another, and has a name that'll be written down on a list forever.

Well, not that the (now dead) king notices.

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Image of the Moment

--I'm not one to go OMGSOCUTE -- squee!!! but... OMGSOCUTE -- squee!!!! The teacup is so perfect. (via cellar.org iotd)

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Poetic Revamp of the Moment
So as a followup to yesterday's poetic work, I googled up this weird variant:

You are my bright and happy summer days. Wait! Summer's beautiful, but full of doubt. You smile like sugar sweets, but never stay. Sometimes you make me want to scream and shout! Laughter is first than comes great disaster. From warm to cold will you not stop my pain? Unfair misery bitterness matter. Why do I love you so? This is so lame! And when we change, you always give reasons. Open my eyes to see the world of truth. So why do I compare you to seasons? You are too strong for death and full of youth. So help me I plea save me from despair! Yet I still love you like no other compare!

It's signed Sin-Jin and I saw it on this guestbook. It takes the rough structure and some of the lines from its source, but then is more of a "Lover's Complaint" than a bit of praise. Still, as a bit of an authority on homebrew love poetry I gotta say... ugh.

Yesterday Ksenia and I finally cleaned up all the junk from my car, and then I took it to this place on Western Ave in Allston to get it detailed... for $30 (plus $8 for the wash) they do a great job, the interior looks pretty much new now. Plus you can go over to the Breakfast Club diner while you wait... it's funny how much of a hipster place that is, but the food was great.

In other news... Red Sox. Damn. Reading the accounts of last night, Schilling put them ahead 5-3 after a rain delay (which probably hurt), Papelbon then giving up a tying bloop single in the ninth (after not letting anything happen after inheriting fully loaded bases in the eight), coming this close to scoring in the bottom of the ninth... it really hurts, but already I'm hearing "wait 'til next year" in the back of my head. (What can I say, I'm a bit fair-weatherish, I know.) Man, do we need Varitek.

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Gallery of the Moment

--from a gallery of great Trek "Motivational" Posters... good stuff.

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Quote of the Moment

Money can't buy happiness, but neither can poverty.

( today's Quote of the Day on Google homepage.) Star Wars Wackiness of the Moment
Chefelf's Star Wars page is worth a read, especially his gripes with the prequels and the rereleases of the original films. It's hard to disagree with any of the points he makes about the dumbness of parts of the movies but I still like 'em... no one else makes movies of this kind, big space opera pseudo-epics with lots of droids and starfighters.

His message boards also had this squicky bit of sibling sultriness shown on the right here.

Sort of gives more support to the whole "Lucas was making it up as he went along" point of view.

In a similar vein, Cap'n Wacky's Gallery of Unfortunate Star Wars Costumes is worth it, especially for this one:
Finally, smashing through the notion that this kind of insane geekery is just the domain of geeky guys, it's...Star Wars Villians with Boobs: The first two are courtesy Cap'n Wacky's List, the last one is a sexy vinyl Vader that was making the rounds a few weeks ago...check out the link for more poses.

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Russian Factoid of the Moment
Russian doesn't bother with seperate words for "skin" and "leather". I like when a language does away with some of the euphemisms we have to put up with in English.

Quote of the Moment

There's an interesting effect here that I've noticed over the years -- smart people don't make the same mistake twice while REALLY SMART people don't make the same mistake three times. Since they tend to make fewer mistakes to start with, really smart people tend to repeat the mistakes they do make because they are initially convinced that the outcome was someone else's fault or perhaps because of cosmic rays.

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Clutter of the Moment

--A photo studio in my office park was having a garage sale for all these old props. I swear, I am trying to reduce the amount of clutter in my life, but how can I resist two high quality cloth fake bananas for 50 cents?

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Geek Ramble of the Moment
So, I had a bit of a revelation yesterday, about my mental model for radio signals...maybe some of the other geeks here can tell me if I'm on base. Since they're both forms of EMF, don't radio waves and visible light act roughly the same? Or, the same if most everything around me was made of glass...(since there are many materials which block light but let radio signals through without too much hassle.)

I think my previous mental model for radio waves comes from those diagrams of slowly moving circles propogating out from a central antenna. (Which is just a shade better than the mental model I got from that old RKO tower logo, big sparks jumping to radios everywhere.) But really, aren't radio waves a lot like visible light? Shining everywhere, passing through some things, reflecting off other things, getting shadows casted by some objects, but still generally scattering and reflecting and what not?

This new idea came to me when I noticed A. radio reception inside my company's parking garage is poor and B. it's dark and C. these two facts are kind of related. I know it's a bit of an oversimplification, and in particular, eyes (taking in a big spectrum of colors at once) don't easily map to radio receivers (tuning in one frequency at a time, and using...signal strength (AM radio) or flicker speed (FM radio) to imitate sound wave patterns.) Still...am I on base with this, or is this all crazy talk?

If I am right about this, it creates some interesting mental images...radio transmitters as these giant torches on towers, and a world with tons of glass trees and buildings, since wood and other building materials often let radio through. (Of course, it also brings up those kind of disturbing idea of all these radio signals passing though us like all the time...)

In a similar note, natural forces and all that, our favorite models of how gravity works may be offbase as well...

Advice of the Moment

If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, like Shakespeare wrote poetry, like Beethoven composed music; sweep streets so well that all the host of Heaven and Earth will have to pause and say, 'Here lived a great sweeper, who swept his job well.'

Doggone it, today I'm going to be the very best Sales Tax and VAT software programmer I can be.

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Link of the Moment
It's a lot of material, but if you like funny and bitter office writing, check out Enter the Cow-orker, many many blog-like entries from the past 2 years or so about one Australian guy's awful, awful officemate. If you're in a hurry check out this entry, this one (which makes sense if you consider the last one, plus all the other overheard phoneconversations related previously in the site), and this one.

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Product of the Moment
Heh. On (I think) right wing Christian radio they were advertising the TV Guardian, a product that promised to automagically bleep out swear words on TV. I was wondering what miracle of speech recognition technology the conservatives had come up with this time, but according to the FAQ, it depends on finding the written version of the offending phrase inside the Closed Captioning, so anything with no or spotty captioning won't work. (Heh, the front page has a chart with some popular movies and what percentage of the cuss words get blocked...they mention that even the family favorite ET has Elliot calling his brother, and her I quote the site, "#!*&#breath". The #!*&# stands for "penis", I always thought "penis breath" was a terrifically evocative phrase. I'd hate to deprive a kid of that. (Really pointless reminiscence: I remember an old Wittenburg Door issue during the height of the ET craze, showing a parody dialog from some church council talking about this movie and its use of the "P-word", and one guy keeps asking "What's the P-word?") Usenet Funny of the Moment

Subject: Re: Cow Tipping on "Whaddya Know"
From: Deborah Stevenson
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban (via alt.humor.best-of-usenet)

Brett Buck writes:

We talked/tricked someone into trying it one time* (in the vein of a snipe hunt, but he took it seriously, and we wanted to do some research, so..), and he was a pretty big guy. He walked up to it, gave it a shove, and it swayed a little bit and just stayed upright. Then he got back and took a run at it, and pretty much just bounced off. Then it woke up, looked vaguely disoriented, and went back to sleep. Then he grabbed one of it's legs, picked it up, and pulled on it, and over it went. Then it woke up, looked vaguely disoriented, stood up, noticed us, and "ran away" (about 100 feet). Cows are stupid.

I'd say they appear the intellectual victors in this particular context.

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Link of the Moment
I had the hardest time finding the new remix of Elvis' "A Little Less Conversation" on CD (hopefully, fourth time is the charm on half.com) but online, Lycos has got me covered. It has the video as well, which is excellent, a lot of fun to watch.

It's kind of cool how this remix put Elvis over the Beatles for #1 singles in England...I guess the Fab Four's only chance is a hit from one of those reunion CDs. Link of the Moment
Going along with the other day's theme of Rock, Scissors, Paper, it's an online rendition of Rock, Paper, Scissors, Spock, Lizard. (you can see original game diagram here... Spock vaporizes Rock, smashes Scissors, is disproven by Paper. Lizard eats Paper, is crushed by Rock and decapitated by Scissors. Finally, Lizard poisons Spock.)

This was on the asymmetric.net games page, I also liked the alien math puzzle there. (And the line about the slot machine: "The money you lose is fake, but the time you waste is all too real.")

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A Bad Joke

Q: What does Snoop Dogg use to clean his laundry?
A: Blee-yotch.

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Commercial of the Moment
I already rambled on about how much I love that VW Pink Moon Commercial. They've scored another emotional hit with the wedding themed "Big Day" spot... so many of the VW Commercials make such good use of music, and they tell stories...I hope they sell a hell of a lot of cars.