I went to vote today, and it was deeply depressing. Since I have this crazy desire to have a system where, you know, votes actually count, I refuse to use the current electronic voting machines. Yet, when I refused the electronic card and asked for a paper ballot, I was told there was no paper-ballot voting. At least when I insisted that yes, there in fact was paper ballot voting, and the desk-workers found someone with a clue, he was happy to give me one, but it was so very sad. First, the poll workers were so badly trained that many people who were only somewhat aware of the issue would probably have just buckled and been pushed into using the electronic voting machines—when poll workers are actively disenfranchising people through poor training, that's just wrong. Second, the clueful person said, “We were just commenting about how there has only been one paper ballot today.” And third, that one ballot was Laura. So the poor training probably didn't even come into play, which is even worse. (I suppose it's possible that one or two people were dissuaded after requesting paper, but I doubt it).

Why are people such sheep? Is it because they trust machines blindly? Or trust authority blindly? I don't even know which is worse. Maybe it's just apathy—I was talking with some co-workers today, who I know know better than to trust the current machines, but they still voted by machine. It's sad. Rigging elections at a national level is now something that requires the know-how of a high-school student, and most people don't care. Now, I'm not politically active—I've never written my congressperson—but if my only option were to vote using the currently-available machines, I wouldn't vote. I'd make a scene at the polling place, I'd write to my representatives at every level, and I'd probably protest at the polls at every election and try to get others to do the same. Would anyone care then? I doubt it.

In summary: the most important vote I feel like I made today was requesting a paper ballot—and it feels like it was a write-in.

Category: Society

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I finally sat down and put the time into debugging and researching that I needed to do to get the blog up and running again. I'm still not sure what all was changed on the server end that fouled everything up; I'm guessing some sort of directory structure change in addition to the change in the user that services requests (www-data? What's up with that?)—the second wasn't the problem that actually brought the whole blog down, but even if it had been the only thing it still would have screwed up the commenting system.

Anyway, despite not knowing what happened a combination of good luck and my growing familiarity with Perl meant I didn't have to go crawling to an admin whose job doesn't even begin to cover keeping my blog running (but would probably have helped anyway) to get help. Just one of the many benefits of higher education.

After all, I do have a masters degree... in Science!

Category: Geek

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There are essentially 4 steps to steaming vegetables:

1. Put some water in the bottom half of a steamer.
2. Put some vegetables in the top half of a steamer.
3. Cover the steamer.
4. Put the steamer on a burner.

If you are going to forget just one of these steps, I highly recommend that it not be step 1.

Category: Random

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Laura and I saw Serenity this weekend, and it was very good. Since we both loved Firefly when we watched the whole (criminally short-lived) series on DVD, our expectations were high. Joss Whedon certainly did not disappoint (which was by no means certain). I tore through seven seasons of Buffy DVDs because of his masterful ability to convey all kinds of ideas, feelings, and emotions in a very direct and moving way through his characters, and his willingness to look hard at anything and everything, without pulling his punches. I loved Firefly for the same reason. Serenity was that same approach distilled down into two intense hours.

I definitely recommend watching the series first, since character-driven stories are more powerful the better you know the characters and you simply can't get the same level of connection in two hours as you can in the longer exposure of the series. That said, I was impressed by the way he introduced everyone and their relationships quickly but without feeling rushed, so I have no doubt that it would stand alone quite well. It's Whedon at his best.

The only downside was that it brought a sense of closure that the aborted series never had, which severely dampened that small glimmer of hope that someday, somehow, Firefly would return to be the many-season show it so richly deserved to be.

Category: A & E

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Number of attempted Joe-job spams since yesterday: 68. Number that actually ended up on the site: 0.

It's really nice using a simple perl weblog, so that I can hack around problems quickly and in a way that the spam scripters aren't as likely to have encountered elsewhere.

Category: Geek

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While I'm on the subject of vile things, I heard the most disturbing commercial on the radio the other day. Verizon is now offering a service where you can customize your ring tone, not just for yourself, but for your caller. You get to pick songs that will play for specific callers instead of the ringing sound.

In other words, you can pay extra to take away a standard, useful piece of feedback, and replace it with something that is almost guaranteed to make the caller feel like they are on hold with a company that “values their call”. Nothing tells the people in your life you care quite like playing muzak at them.

I think I'll pass though. I'm holding out for the ability to require callers to first navigate an annoying automated menu driven by a peppy but chronically deaf voice-activated system. The ability to periodically break in to the muzak in such a way that the caller will think they have finally gotten though, just to give them the critical news that they in fact are still waiting would be a nice bonus, but I'm flexible on that point.

Category: Society

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So when I finally sit down to post again after long neglect, I find some net vandal has just left me spam on not fewer than 35 of my old posts. At first, I was confused, because the spam pointed not to cheap drugs, porn, or gambling, but to a couple of what appeared to be random personal weblogs. That seemed pretty odd, so I followed one and found a bunch of comments saying, basically, “Why are you spamming my weblog's comments?”. I tried another, and hit pay dirt: a likely theory as to what the heck was going on. Apparently one of the anti-blogspam methods is to maintain a big blacklist of sites that pay to be listed in comment spam, and subscribers automatically ban anything related to that site. So the slime molds of the spam industry took their giant list of weblogs, and started randomly spamming them with links to other weblogs on their list, in the hope of totally mucking up the blacklist by filling it with legitimate, innocent sites. That's really, really dirty. I really wish that we could track down these spammers on by one, find something in each of their lives that gives them happiness, and do everything possible to ruin it for them out of spite. Just so they'd know how it felt.

Anyway, cleaning up spam is a tedious process with my weblog setup, so after the 30 minutes or so it took to erase the damage I am completely fed up (and it really didn't help that I got another one while composing this post). There's no obvious way to block these posts by content, so I'm doing something I really didn't want to do: making commenters jump through hoops. I'm trying to start small—a check-box indicating that you are not, in fact, spamming. If the spamming programs (or people, if it's actually an army of soulless peons) are smart enough to check the box, I guess I'll have to do something even more annoying. I absolutely refuse to use the standard captchas, since they are an accessibility nightmare, so I'm hoping I won't have to consider what I would use instead.

In conclusion, I'm back, and I really, really hate spammers.

Category: Geek

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I was reading about the Kansas school system intelligent design debates (after a co-worker introduced me to the Flying Spaghetti Monster), and talking to Laura about it, and came to a realization. I know how to deal with the question of intelligent design in schools, and I better understand why I don't think intelligent design belongs in biology class.

It belongs in math class.

That's right, you heard me. Math. See, creationism is an alternative to evolution (and when I say evolution, I refer only to the physical mechanics; that will be important later). Intelligent design is not—it's an alternative to probability as it is currently presented, or, to be more accurate, intelligent design is an alternative to random chance in all of its forms. Nothing about intelligent design is actually unique to evolution; at its core it's just a restatement of the idea that “God does not play [fair] dice”. Fundamentally, I see nothing wrong with teaching that in schools, in the context of probability. All of probability is based on the precondition of “all other things being equal”, and intelligent design just says things can never be known to be equal, because there could be a higher power waiting to meddle at its whim. You could argue that it's weak science, because it's not provable or disprovable (the whims of an intelligence we don't understand being by more or less by definition indistinguishable from random chance), but it's not science—it's a basic assumption. And the same is equally true of the idea that all things are governed by random chance, and there's nothing wrong with pointing out that we should question basic, unfounded assumptions. Probability (or at least the application thereof to anything in the real world) is then recognized not as a mathematical truth, but a generally useful theory for prediction, which is exactly as it should be given that all of its applications are based on an assumption we can't prove.

Then, all that remains is to remove the word “random” from most scientific teaching materials, since random is in opposition to intelligent design, and thus an endorsement of atheism in most cases. If we simply talk about “chance”, and understand that to be either random on not, according to our beliefs, then we all gain a better understanding of the difference between fact and theory, our teaching is more belief-agnostic—and the issue of evolution becomes simply one special case of that.

So that's my plan, which I think is very workable. Except of course for the fact that that most of the scientific community would rebel against it, since it weakens the public facade of infallibility so many people of science wish so wrongly to cultivate. It wouldn't really weaken science in any real way; probability would remain exactly as useful as a prediction tool provided that any intelligent forces continue in the same fashion they have through all the experiments that led to the creation of the theory of random chance... and that caveat is nothing new, since all of science predicts based on the assumption that things will generally stay the same. It's just a case of all of us learning to be a little more aware of how deep that caveat runs.

I bet you didn't think this was going to be an endorsement of teaching intelligent design when you saw the title, did you? I didn't either, when I started thinking and talking things out with Laura. It just goes to show that you can learn some startling things when you question what you haven't really thought to question about your education.

Category: Society

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And speaking of photography: Chapter 2 in the story of my camera exploration, this time playing for the first time with night photography (in the park next to our apartment). I picked up a light-weight tripod when I got the camera, but hadn't yet played with it much. Nothing particularly inspired came of the outing, although I did especially like how the flag turned out.

I was surprised at how easy it was to recover the true colors out of the pictures, despite the low light. After consider, though, I find I do prefer the mood of the pictures as they came off the camera (except for the flag, where the originally simply looked muddy).

I may play with altering the color balance only in the sky, as the red of the sky is very striking, especially in the first scene, but is almost entirely lost in the un-retouched version.

Category: Photos

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Over the weekend I finally finished a project I started several weeks ago: putting my pictures and collected bits and pieces from my trip to France together into an album/scrapbook. “Wow,” you may be saying to yourself, “hasn't it been three years since you went to France?” Yes... only these weren't pictures from our honeymoon. These are from my class trip to France in middle school.

So... yeah. Better really, really late than never, right? And it was a lot of fun to look back and remember those bits and pieces of the trip that I captured (although it's too bad I didn't keep a journal as I'm sure lots of good stuff has been lost to antiquity). I am happy to report though that my photography has improved significantly in the last 10 years.

Category: Random

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In what is now becoming almost a tradition, Laura, Josh, and I sunk several hours last night into a spectacularly unfulfilling movie. Our list now consists of Johnny English (not nearly as funny as hoped), The Aviator (some interesting scenes strung together by hours of essentially pointless filler), and now The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. All three of us had the feeling we must have been missing something—something deep and vital that would have given meaning to the whole film. We have no clue what that something might be though, and without that something the movie made no sense, and was only barely entertaining for a handful of minutes.

I really liked Lost in Translation, so it's not that I don't have the capacity to enjoy Bill Murray in somewhat strange films. And lots of other people seem to have liked Life Aquatic, so presumably there was something redeeming in it. Yet somehow the film and I never managed to connect.

If you know the secret that makes it worthwhile, do tell.

Category: A & E

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Buzz has some great interviewing tips that everyone new to interviewing should definitely read.

Having been doing some interviewing myself recently (some of the same interviews, in fact), all I would add is to go a bit further and break talking out into its own item. (My opinions, not my employer's, void where prohibited, etc.)

Talk, talk, talk: If you are given a problem-solving problem, the interviewer wants to see you solving the problem. Silence and/or muttering as you try to work through it won't give the interviewers any insight into what and how you think, which means it's only marginally useful if you get the right answer, and worthless if you don't. Plus, many interviewers will give hints to keep things moving and give you a chance to get to other interesting parts of the question—if you are silently going down the wrong path, you are on your own. Worried about saying something that's wrong as you think out loud? Don't worry about that too much. If you realize your mistake while talking it through, and correct yourself, all the better.

Category: Random

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I finally got around to seeing a dentist this morning after my long college-induced hiatus. The important things I learned during my visit:

1. I brush extremely well, and/or have magic teeth
2. However, brushing really can't reach everywhere—just because the hygienist thinks you are flossing when you are 16 doesn't mean that you don't actually have to floss
3. Fillings wear out after about as many years as I've had all five of mine
4. Dental insurance is a beautiful thing

Despite my impending dental work, it was a pretty good first visit. I got to see a larger-than-life, almost-live video of my own teeth, which was new to me, and had my X-rays explained to me in great detail. So far, I definitely like my new dentist... which is good considering I'll be seeing a lot of him in the near future.

The real high point of the visit, though, is that I now know why I'm senile before my time: my current fillings are made of a mixture of silver and mercury. Sure, they say it's safe, but I choose to cling to my new scapegoat.

Category: Life

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Laura and I recently decided, as we have several times, that we need to find a larger abode, and one that will allow cats. This time, however, we decided to look at houses for rent instead of the apartments that have disappointed us all the previous times, so we went to a duplex that was (half) for rent not far away. It was great! Almost twice the size of our apartment, small enclosed yard where Laura could garden, pet-friendly, residential area, apparently nice next-door-neighbor landlord, still within easy biking distance of work... and $1750 a month. That's actually quite reasonable for the area, sadly, so we considered it. But finally we decided that we just couldn't justify it to ourselves. Yes, it would be nicer—but so would a several-week-vacation to Hawaii every year, and that would probably be cheaper than all the extra money we'd be pouring into rent.

Then, that got me thinking more about the black hole that is rent, and it just made me more and more annoyed. Why should we contribute to someone else buying a house almost for free? We want a house; we should contribute to that instead! So then we started looking at condos, as strange as that seems to me (I've never been able to shake the association that condos are for old people in Florido, for whatever reason). They're still expensive, but unlike actually houses they might be within the realm of possibility—I'm willing to pay more if I don't feel like I'm throwing my money away. So I dug around some and read up on condos, and am now well armed with information, the most important points I gleaned being:

• Buying a condo is vastly superior to renting.
• Renting is vastly superior to buying a condo.

We figure it's at least looking into at least, so the next stop is a realtor who can tell us just how many of our children we'd have to be prepared to sign away for a condo we'd actually want to live in.

It's just so frustrating, because here I am, married, have a master's degree, have a good job at a great, successful company; this is traditionally the part where we buy a house and settle down, but instead we're still trying to figure out if such a thing is even theoretically possible. Where's my American Dream, damn it?

Category: Life

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The mouse I had rescued from my problem pile to use at work died again recently, and this time taking it apart and reassembling it didn't help. Since I can't live without a scroll wheel, it was time for a little visit to the company store. Last time I bought a mouse, I toyed with the idea of getting a trackball, since I have almost no mouse space on my desk at home. I have no trackball experience though, and they look strange enough that I was afraid it would be too awkward and I'd have to buy yet another mouse right away. This time, since I seem to be burning through mice fairly quickly, I decided the risk was worth taking and got a trackball instead of a mouse.

Considering how different the control method is, I was surprised at how easy it is to use. I was able to handle it reasonably well straight out of the box, although fine control was difficult. After a couple of days it's starting to feel more natural (although my thumb is confused by having to do so much work), and I suspect it will be just as good as a mouse before long.

Besides being better-suited to the space I have at home, I get the added advantage of having a different pointing device at work and at home—I figure that regardless of which is “better” for routine use, doing something different at work and at home is even better, especially given how much computer time I log between the two. Now I just need some sort of bizarre alternative keyboard construction, and I should be all set.

Category: Geek

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Imagine if you will that you are driving in a center lane on the interstate, and come up behind someone going slower than you. You want to pass, then return to your current lane. The lanes to the left and right are both clear ahead and behind. Do you pass on:

1. the left, or
2. the right?

If you picked a), congratulations, you aren't an idiot! If you picked b), take comfort in the fact that you will fit right in in California.

Category: Society

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As usual, I'm terribly behind in my posting. The most notable event(s) recently have been some additions to the Morgan clan. Two weeks ago I branched out from having just a niece, and now have a brand nephew as well. A couple of days later, I went to an uncle's wedding, where I got not only a new aunt, but two bonus cousins. Plus I got a chance to see basically everyone again after my long exile in Ohio, and Laura got to meet most of my extended family in one gigantic reunion—not only the best way to get the Morgan experience, but also good retaliation for the whirlwind tour I got of her relatives.

It still feels a bit strange for things to be changing so much recently, since for most of my childhood my family was fairly static. In recent years, though, there's been a good bit of growth even without counting the massive familial influx that came with marrying Laura. Before I know it, there may be relatives in the next generation of my side of the family—the part I can keep track of, even—to whom my relationship can't be described with fewer than four words, one of which will be “removed”.

I suspect that the first time I remember some teenager in my extended family at a family reunion from their infancy, and they don't have even the remotest idea who I am, I'll have to go out and buy an expensive convertible or something.

Category: Life

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You know who would look totally hot in pants a number of sizes too small for her?

Nobody.

I'm not clear on how someone who has thought through the need to wear a thong (which reminds me, wearing too-tight pants made of thin white material is a whole extra level of not-hot) to avoid having visible lines can miss the fat bulging out all around the top of her pants.

The lesson here is, if the answer to the question, “do these pants make me look fat” is painfully clearly “Yes, very much so, and skanky to boot!”, then don't wear them.

The preceding has been a public service announcement on behalf of everyone has to go out in public and be subjected to that sort of thing.

Category: Society

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So through some random link-following I read some of a highly amusing site run by someone trying warn people of the dangers posed by the aliens experimenting on us, and explaining how you can defend yourself (the answer, of course, being the next generation in tin-foil hats—just as stupid looking, but now with 10 times the mind-control-stopping effectiveness). What struck me most is that we apparently know that among other things aliens can:

• Control gravity
• Pass through solid objects
• Perform surgical procedures

And yet “aliens have not been able to remove a thought screen helmet secured with tape or string.” Clearly these aliens need some help managing their invasion, if they haven't managed to figure out how to apply their powers and tools to the daunting task of cutting through tape. But since they can read my thoughts from 100 miles away, I'm sure they are on their way over right now to discuss a lucrative consulting contract.

Category: Random

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Sometimes the religious right just pisses me off, but other times they make me feel downright sick. Take the following gem from an article about vaccines being developed for the human papilloma virus:

In the US, for instance, religious groups are gearing up to oppose vaccination, despite a survey showing 80 per cent of parents favor vaccinating their daughters. “Abstinence is the best way to prevent HPV,” says Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council, a leading Christian lobby group that has made much of the fact that, because it can spread by skin contact, condoms are not as effective against HPV as they are against other viruses such as HIV.

“Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful, because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex,” Maher claims

Remember kids, it's wrong to allow terminally ill people to end their life in a manner of their choosing, but it's okay to withhold potentially life-saving treatments from people who don't choose to live their lives according your rules!

So here's what really gets me. Lets assume the existence of a 100% effective HPV virus (it doesn't exist yet, as far as I know, but it theoretically could). There's no reason to think that these people wouldn't be at least as against it as they are against the 90%+ version being tested now. Given that vaccine, every case of HPV that leads to cervical cancer and possible death would be preventable. Morally, there is no difference I can see between withholding such a vaccine from everybody when it could be administered, and intentionally introducing a new potentially deadly STD into the population. You know what the latter would be called? Biological warfare. Terrorism. It would get you locked in a small cell in a military camp existing outside of normal US laws. But the former is just “protecting family values”.

Oh, and that 80% number? I was heartened by it until I read it the other way: 20% of parents would like to see their daughters get cancer and possibly die if they engage in pre- or extra-marital sex (or even just marry someone who has/does).

Category: Society

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Pet peeve of the day: seeing people copy my old EECS 338 home page and/or recitation notes including the “Valid XHTML 1.1” badge at the bottom, but then break the validity when they make whatever changes they need to make. If you don't know what the badge means or aren't going to make valid changes, then delete it! The fact that the people doing this are TAs in the Computer Science department makes me sad.

Also, as a general rule, when copying forward text that says it was updated “last year”, and said text is two years old, there's a little bit of editing that needs to be done. I mean, come on.

On the other hand it certainly is gratifying to see that the notes I spent two years creating and tuning appear to have become the de facto syllabus for the recitations.

Category: Geek

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Movie roundup for the week (movies I happened to see this week, not movies that are new this week):

The Good: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I wasn't expecting this to be very good (I was afraid that like Being John Malkovich it would never make any discernible point), but got it on a lark, and found it to be excellent. It was very thought-provoking in its exploration of the bittersweet aspects of relationships, but with a subtly that I find lacking (and aggravatingly so) in so many stories that try to make a point. I can't stand movies and books where you can practically hear the author shouting: “Now I am going to talk about topic X! Here is what I think about topic X. In case you missed that, I think this about topic X. Really! Lets go over that one more time—you stand right there, and I'll beat you over the head with my views. Great! Now back to the movie.”

Eternal Sunshine certainly had its share of really bizarre scenes that made no sense at the time, but by the end in most cases I could see how it fit in to the story being woven, and how its presence enhanced (again, subtly) the ideas.

Two thumbs up.

The Bad: Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle. Bad does not even come close here—we borrowed it from the library, for free, and I still feel robbed. 106 minutes of my life are gone and I dearly want them back.

The theory that Laura and I have is that this sequel is the universe's way of balancing itself out. We got the original expecting it to be awful, and instead found it to be an entertaining, humorously campy experience. We got the second expecting another fun fluff movie, and instead had our very low expectations for the original realized this time around. Apparently the distinction between “campy” and “mind-bogglingly stupid” was lost on the scriptwriters/producers/directors.

I do not have enough thumbs to put down.

The ‘Meh’: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I actually saw this about a week and a half ago, but “The Good, The Bad, And I Didn't See A Third Movie” just didn't have the same ring. I wouldn't recommend Hitchhiker's to anyone, but I wouldn't actively dissuade anyone from seeing it either—that's about the best I can say about it. I know that The Man himself did a fair amount of the screen adaptation for this version, but I think some serious damage must have been done afterward. I simply can't believe that removing most of the funny dialog was his idea—presumably someone had to cut brutally to make room for important additions like the totally pointless dolphin scene at the beginning. On the bright side, there were sufficient amusing moments that I wanted neither my time nor my money back when I left the theater.

I guess my feeling is that if you already have two excellent adaptations (in the forms of the book and the radio show), making a significantly inferior third adaptation isn't a terribly good idea. But maybe I just miss Peter Jones.

Two thumbs that can't really be bothered to vote one way or the other.

Category: A & E

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It's getting to the point that I wouldn't be at all surprised to see an exchange like this in the support section of one of the big Mac forum sites:

Posted by mac_n00b
so I opened up my hard drive and smeared the insides with butter to make it run faster but when I put it back in smoke came out of my computer and now it doesn't boot... help please!!!!

Posted by EliteMacGuru
Try booting from CD and running “Repair Permissions” on the volume

Given a week and a handful of fake accounts on some big Mac forums, I wonder what other bizarre witch-doctor fixes could be made to take root.

Category: Geek

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One of my favorite new Tiger features is small, and tucked away somewhat, so it's not widely known:

1. Open up Mail, Safari, TextEdit, or just about anything Cocoa (sadly, no Camino though)
2. Hold down Command-Control-D (well actually you don't have to keep holding the D, oddly enough)
3. Mouse over some words
4. Make “ooh” and “aah” noises

You can get the same effect on just one word with the selection context menu item “Look Up in Dictionary”—by default that will open the new Dictionary application, but there's a preference in Dictionary that makes it use the panel instead. I'd have used the much cooler panel as the default myself, but having the preference is enough for me.

Update: Buzz has posted a picture of the dictionary panel, which should be handy for those of my readers too misguided to be able to try this out for themselves.

Category: Geek

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Quick, how many GB of data can you burn onto a 4.7 GB DVD?

Just as with hard-drives, it continues to boggle my mind that this isn't illegal.

Category: Random

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Je viens de lire avec Laura plusiers livres pour enfants, et un de ces livres s'agit d'un renard qui (entre plusiers autres aventures) parlait avec un corbeau. Tout d'un coup, les première lignes d'une des fables d'Aesop, en forme de poème, sont arrivés dans ma tête. Je l'avais apris par cœur il y a plusieurs annés, probablement en collège. Je m'en souvenais de seulement sept ou huit lignes, et j'avais l'intention de demander si quelqu'un pourrait me fournir le poème entière—parce que j'ai cherché “mettre corbeau sur un arbre perché” au lieu de “maître corbeu sur un arbre perché”, et j'ai rien trouvé; c'est ça la difficulté avec ce qu'on apprend par cœur oralement.

Et la voilà, pour les curieux:

Maître corbeau, sur un arbre perché,
Tenait en son bec un fromage.
Maître renard par l'odeur alléché,
Lui tint à peu près ce langage:
«Hé! Bonjour Monsieur du Corbeau.
Que vous êtes joli! Que vous me semblez beau!
Sans mentir, si votre ramage
Se rapporte à votre plumage,
Vous êtes le phénix des hôtes de ces bois.»
A ces mots le corbeau ne se sent pas de joie;
Et pour montrer sa belle voix,
Il ouvrir un large bec, laisse tomber sa proie.
Le renard s'en saisit, et dit: «Mon bon monsieur,
Apprenez que tout flatteur
Vit aut dépens de celui qui l'écoute.
Cette leçon vaut bien un formage, sans doute.»
Le corbeau, honteux et confus,
Jura, mais un peu tard, qu'on ne l'y prendrait plus.

(Ça fait plusieurs annés que j'ai presque point écrit en français, alors ça ne m'étonnerait pas si il y a pas mal de fautes.)

Category: Random

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Laura had decreed that yesterday would be spring cleaning day, so the whole apartment got a much-needed picking-up/dusting/vacuuming/scrubbing. As it turned out though, we did a much more thorough job than we expected, since it's easier to clean everywhere when you move most of your furniture—which we did.

You see, the only high-speed internet access available here is, unfortunately, expensive cable-modem service. Since there are only two cable jacks in the apartment, and the one in the bedroom was no good since I often compute far past Laura's bedtime, we really only had one usable jack, annoyingly located on the island-wall separating the kitchen from the living room. The point being (there is, in fact, a point!) that we had to put my desk in the living room when we moved in, unless we wanted to drape coaxial cable across the floor. In order to fit the couch, TV, and stereo stuff in as well we ended up with a really awkward arrangement where my desk stuck out sideways, which segmented the space, made the living room feel much smaller, and partitioned off the kitchen and dining room area more than we would have liked. Plus, the back of my desk wasn't that attractive a view for the living room.

A week or so ago, though, I gave the old Lombard a new life as a wireless base-station and mini-server so that my computer wouldn't have to stay on all the time serving that purpose (and being noisy and drawing more power). And so (merciful Zeus, the tangent finally ends!) we finally had the freedom to create a furniture arrangement that sucks less, and we seized that freedom yesterday. Now the living room and dining room are combined into one space, with the light from the full-wall glass patio doors making it a lot further into the living room. Giving up ugly and awkward for more light seems like a good deal to me, as does trading the glare on my monitor from a window behind me for a nice view outside while setting at my desk.

My desk, some of my random junk, and Laura's sewing machine do make what was the dining room feel more crowded—and consequently the kitchen as well—but since the dining room used to be overfilled by our table anyway that isn't much of a loss. And who knows, maybe I'll even get wild and crazy enough to clean up my desk, so that it doesn't feel like it's going to spill over and bury the room. But even if I don't, now we can at least sit in the large, airy living room/dining room, and pretend this apartment isn't too small for us and all our stuff.

Category: Life

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Tiger will be available soon! I think it can be best said in the words of one of everyone's favorite internet memes:

It's the best! Beats the rest!

• Cellular
• Modular
• Interactive-odular

And as if that weren't enough: it's 100% PABA free!

Category: Geek

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It turns out that being called for jury duty consists primarily of sitting around for two half-days listening to strangers talk about their lives, then being sent home because you aren't needed. I think close to an hour of my life was squandered just because most of the people selected had received a speeding ticket at some point in their life.

So to anyone who ever has to sit and wait while I am screened for a jury: I'm sorry in advance for the speeding ticket I got last summer.

Category: Life

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Normally I have a hard time getting out of the shower in the mornings. I'm generally still partially asleep, and the hot water is relaxing and comfortable, so it just seems best to stay there.

Not so much when the shower is all cold because the hot water is mysteriously just air instead. Next time the hot water pressure is noticeably low when I go to bed at 1:30, I'm going to call someone at home and raise hell rather than just shrug and go to sleep.

Category: Random

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The winner of my camera run-off, after much reading, playing with cameras, and pondering, was the Olympus C-7000. What with the craziness of work, I haven't had too much time to play with it, but this morning a leaf on our patio/deck/porch caught my eye. All but one other leaf I could see were wet in a vague, glossy-sheen sort of way, but this one leaf was instead studded with individial water drops. Since one of the things that swayed me toward the Olympus was the 5x optical zoom and super-macro shooting mode (as close as 2cm), this leaf called out to me as a perfect zoom test subject.

And so, in celebration of my camera, I am opening a new “Photos” section with a few leaf pictures. The large versions have been scaled down significantly; the original files are over three times the size (in each direction). 7 mega-pixels is a lot of pixels!

First, the secondary droplet-covered leaf. Not so interesting as a picture as the one that caught my attention, but it gives the context for the detail veiw (which shows the full resolution of the camera).

I love the full view of the sky and trees overhead in the drop. The hardest part of taking this picture was making sure I didn't actually hit the leaf with my lens, I was so close.

Then a shot I like since it captures a bit of the feeling I got when I first glanced outside and the leaf jumped out at me. It's great fun to play with the photos afterwards, which is what I love most about digital photography. One press of a button gives me a sepia view, which I really like for the way it brings out the brightness of the water drops. Then I just had fun with the image for a few minutes, and created a version which is completely different from what was actually there, but says a lot about the way I saw the leaf.

The hardest part here was the angle; the LCD screen came in extremely handy as I don't think I could have gotten my head low enough to frame the shot the way I wanted if I'd needed to use the viewfinder, and as it was I still needed to crop slightly to get the frame right (another reason to love digital!).

Hopefully this section will grow as I have time to take my camera exploring.

Category: Photos

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This was originally going to be a post linking to pictures I took of the new baby ducks in our apartment complex, but unfortunately those pictures will never see the light of day (or even the pale glow of the internet). For whatever reason, my SmartMedia card failed or was destroyed when I tried to get the pictures off, leaving me not only without duck pictures but in need of a new high-capacity SmartMedia card (as the 8 and 16 MB cards aren't quite as useful as the 64 MB that's now defunct). But the geek in me said, “Why buy new media for $20 when you could buy a new camera for $500 instead?”

Okay, so it's actually been building up for a while—I'm not that far gone. My Olympus D-460 has been a fine camera (and I'm not just saying that because Laura is reading), but as I've grown slightly in my photography I find myself hitting the limits of the D-460. Most glaringly, 1.3 Megapixels just isn't enough, as I learned when I tried to enlarge some of my favorite Hawaii pictures. But I'm also at the point where I'd like to play around with more manual controls sometimes, and I'd like more zoom as well.

Armed with that knowledge I struck out into the web, where I quickly learned that I am (or at least have aspirations of being) a “prosumer”—or a serious amateur in non-marketing-speak. The really tough part is deciding what form factor I want though. Everything I've read suggests that I really need a camera with either a fixed-zoom or interchangeable lens to get the full serious-amateur range. But that means a bulkier camera, and I've been spoiled by the easy-to-sling-around D-460.

In the end, I think I'm going to go with a high-end retractable-zoom-lens camera. Will it limit me? Probably. But ultimately I think I'm always going to want to have a small camera that I can use for point-and-shoot (but can at the same time rise to the challenge of an unexpected opportunity for a better shot), so even if I decide to really get serious down the road a camera like that will always have its niche for me. Besides, I'm not sure I'm quite ready to shell out the cash for a digital SLR (interchangeable lens) camera, and I suspect that a fixed-zoom camera would ultimately be unsatisfying if I grow, and unsatisfying at the more point-and-shoot end either way.

The current contenders, from my reading, are:

• Olympus C-7000
• Casio EXILIM EX-P700
• Sony Cyber-shot DSC-V3
• Canon PowerShot G6

The first two are smaller and lighter, which appeals to me, but it remains to be seen whether I actually care when I'm holding them in my hands. All have at least 4x optical zoom, which is better than the D-460, all are 7 MP, which will work just fine for all my uses, and all are somewhere around $500 dollars. I'm leaning toward the Olympus, partially because I was so pleased with the D-460 and partially for the extra zoom (although I'd take a slight hit on landscapes with the 38mm min (max?) at the other end), but I'll have to play with it to see if the reported auto-focus difficulties will hurt its point-and-shoot ability in normal use.

Next stop: the camera store, to see what I can see. Advice and personal experiences welcome.

Category: Geek

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Congratulations to Josh! A great day for Camino (and Firefox), but a sad one for any other fine company that might have wanted to hire him. I expect that Camino will rock even more now.

(I also expect some tasty vegan dinners in my future ;) )

Category: Camino

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I did absolutely nothing, and it was everything I thought it could be.

Category: Life

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Normally I don't post these viral “What ________ are you?” quizzes, but this one was fun enough to take (although the ordering of the answers really needs to be randomized to make it less predictable) that I'll make an exception. But only because it's part of my evil plan, of course.

What Type of Villain are You?

Category: Random

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It wasn't supposed to rain today, and I still haven't bought fenders. So now I'm very wet again. This weekend, I'm definitely getting fenders. Really.

Category: Random

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To really get things started right, I'm adding a bonus round to this quiz. I was thinking about the famous quote about the rule against ending sentences with prepositions, generally attributed to Churchill: “This is the sort of (English | bloody nonsense | arrant pedantry) up with which I will not put!” As I thought about it, I realized that it is not only awkward, but grammatically incorrect as well. What is the error?

Category: Language

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That's right, it's back by popular demand! I fully intend for it to be a (semi-)regular feature, and in celebration of that commitment I have created a new language category (and moved my previous language-related posts into it).

This week's quiz has a whole host of answers, so everyone can be a winner. Yes, you there, you could be a winner! Step right up! 100 points per correct answer! The goal is to give the origin of as many of the following names for days of the week as possible—no full etymology necessary, just the root meaning (i.e., who or what it is named for):

English: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday
French: Dimanche, Lundi, Mardi, Mercredi, Jeudi, Vendredi, Samedi
German: Sonntag, Montag, Dienstag, Mittwoch, Donnerstag, Freitag, Samstag

Have at!

Category: Language

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I am, as you may know, a huge online comic junkie. One of my favorites, PvP, has been running a recent series about jury duty, and shortly after it started, what did I receive in the mail but my very own summons to jury duty. Then, when Laura made a crack about how I wouldn't be selected because I'm too informed and somewhat interested in law, this was the very next comic.

I have to admit, the idea is intriguing, and I'm sort of hoping I'll be picked (although I'm sure that if I were it would be some really boring case). The only downside is that I'm not sure it's going to mesh at all with my work schedule, so we'll see how that works out.

Maybe I should start watching reality TV or something to temporarily rot my brain if I want to increase my chances of being picked.

Category: Life

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I am getting really tired of reading press releases from iPod competitor wanna-bes saying that their product is better because the iPod can “only” play music from the iTMS, whereas their product can play music from “all the other major online music stores.” First off, they should be sued for saying it, because it's completely untrue. There is another new-fangled source of music that they may have heard of called “CDs”, which iPods have no problem with, so this vendor lock-in they try to make people afraid of is completely made up. But lets look at just online music stores now, and take a moment to count all the major online music stores other than the iTMS:

*chirp* *chirp* *chirp*

And we're done! Hey, here's a tip for all the iPod wanna-bes out there: users don't care about your FUD. I doubt anyone has ever returned an iPod because they couldn't get music onto it easily enough. Instead, if you want some market share, try, you know, making a better product. Think different.

I've got to run. I need to get a better VCR, because this lame model I have only plays VHS, and none of the other major video-cassette formats.

Category: Geek

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So in early December, when I ordered Laura‘s laptop, it went from Shanghai to Anchorage to Indianapolis to my door in Cupertino in about 36 hours. That wasn't even any kind of rush shipping. I was highly impressed.

So far, my iSight has been in transit from Sacramento for almost 2 full days. It spent 20 hours in a sort facility. 20! And now, 12 hours after leaving San Jose on a delivery vehicle, it still hasn't managed to find me yet. I'll tell you, Cupertino's not that big, and our receiving department really isn't that hard to find.

Apparently I need to order more of my stuff directly from warehouses in Shanghai, where they don't ship things by strapping them to a narcoleptic snail with no sense of direction.

Category: Random

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Sometimes it's great to just decide to embrace a heavy(ish) rain by deciding to not care that you'll get completely soaked and bike home anyway. And in that respect, it was... what I failed to consider, though, was the dirt aspect that comes with not having any fenders. I don't think my coat and backpack were very amused.

Category: Random

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Clearly, “punctuality” and “not getting behind” are not on the list. But better late than never, so here they are:

• Keep up my French
• Learn basic German
• Keep dancing
• Keep exercising
• Read more
• Justify my KeyStation now that I have my old basic piano books
• Keep in touch with people at least slightly better

In short, do more of the sorts of things I like to do but often neglect in favor of doing pretty much nothing at all.

Also, apparently, not sleep much.

Category: Life

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Rather than try to give a full (and boring) account of my vacation, which would never get done anyway, I'll simply share some random vacation thoughts:

• Winter vacation is surprisingly short out here in the Real World™.
• Crossword puzzles are dangerously addictive.
• Working for a sexy, well-known company is totally the way to go when it comes time to attend a (pseudo) high-school reunion.
• Yes, Hero is still that good the second time.
• No matter how many times I read almost nothing on vacations, I'm still convinced it's important to take two or three books with me.
• Presents are very, very exciting when you are three and a half.
• The iTalk may be more expensive than writing reminders to myself on paper, but it's way more fun and a lot harder to lose.
• Pfeffernüsse is quite tasty.
• Friends don't let friends visit Powell's with a credit card.
• There's a reason that samba baterias generally play outside.
• Snow is much prettier on forested hills as I drive by than it was piled on the sidewalk and by the side of the road as I slogged to class.

All in all, a very successful holiday.

Category: Random

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