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| I emailled myself some D&D character sheets from my work machine so I'd be able to access them at home. I was amused to find that the body of the email I sent read "Characters, make of them what I will.". | ||||||
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Buddha Buck
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February 4th, 2010
January 31st, 2010
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| I've apparently 25 Google Wave invites to hand out. Anyone want one? | ||||||
| comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
January 29th, 2010
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| I often have things I want to say or talk about, be it political, technological, mathematical, etc. But I'm struck by analysis paralysis: if I'm not perfect in what I want to say, I don't say it. This is an attempt to get out my thoughts before they are fully finished, because some thoughts are never fully baked without feedback. So here's the first in a continuing series of half-baked thoughts... For all the various proposals and bellyaching thrown around over the past couple of decades, the structure of the US Federal Income Tax scheme has been relatively constant: About a half-dozen marginal tax brackets (indexed to inflation) ranging from about 10-35%, with deductions for various essential and incentivized expenses. This structure was put in place in the 1986 tax overhaul, and while there have been 1 or two brackets added (near the bottom) and some of the rates and bracket boundaries have been tweaked, it's nothing compared to the pre-1986 tax structure. In addition to the taxes on earned income in those brackets, there's a separate scheme for capital gains, and the AMT in place to catch people who've been able to take too much advantage of the incentivized deductions. The above is, of course, a simplification. It ignores such issues as estate taxes and all the various use taxes and fees-for-services that are also part of the tax code. I know that, so don't raise a fuss about that simplification, yet. Deficit spending is a problem, and has always been a problem in the US (there are occasional, rare, periods when the Federal budget earns a surplus, most recently in the late 1990's, and in the late 1960's before that, but they are not common). I'm not going to pick on any party or president or congress; there's enough blame to go around. Many have seen this as a problem, and there have been many ideas to solve it. Most recently, there have been "pay-as-you-go" rules in Congress, where any spending increase or tax cut has to be offset by a spending decrease or tax increase to balance it. The idea being that the spending bill will end up being "revenue neutral" and with luck will improve things without actually spending any more Government money. This rarely works. Most often, when a program is suggested that would cost money the result is to institute a "special" tax to pay for it. The tax is usually targeted at the same general field as the program, so either constitutes a use-tax (like the gas taxes designed to help pay for the highway system) or a related excise or sin tax (like cigarette taxes designed to help pay for health care). A current example is the idea of health insurance subsidies for low-income citizens being paid for by a tax on high-cost health insurance plans. But what never gets touched for this "pay-as-you-go" is the base income tax schedule. I have never heard any politician say "X is a vital service which needs increased government support, and will cost $Y/year, which we can get in a revenue neutral way by increasing the 25% tax bracket to 25.5% or the 15% long-term capital gains rate to 16%." Everything new gets funded by specialized taxes most people don't notice. The end result is that the government finance system is fragmented: the base income tax system pays for most stuff that's been around for a long time, while there's a whole alternate system of special taxes and fees supposedly designed to make everything "revenue neutral", but of course rarely works. This is fundamentally different than how most local governments pay for things (in theory, anyway). Most local governments have a known property tax base and an adjustable tax rate. Each year they go "We need to spend $X money to provide necessary government services, and our total assessed taxable properties are worth $Y, so we set the tax rate to $(X/Y)/(property value) and that'll pay for it all." There are of course massive arguments over what constitutes "necessary government services", whether $X is too high, whether my share of $Y is too high, etc, and there are usually other income sources which cut down on the amount of $X needed to be raised by property taxes, but that's basically it. The local tax rates are determined based on actual budgeted spending, while Federal tax rates are somewhat fixed, and aren't strongly tied to budgeted spending. The local tax rates are determined holistically, taking into account the entire budget, while Federal taxes are broken into several semi-independent tax fifedoms most of which are supposed to be "revenue neutral" by themselves. I think the Federal system is overly complex, doesn't relate general revenues to general expenses, and has no real method for adjusting tax rates to balance the budget. A simpler system, such as a flat tax or the "Fair Tax" (national sales tax with monthly rebates of taxes on poverty-level income) would be far easier to tweak, as part of the appropriations bills would be to adjust the tax rate to try to achieve balance, in much the same way that the local tax rates are adjusted to balance. I'm sure I'm missing something, and I'm sure you'll point it out, but like I said, this thought is only half-baked. | ||||||||
| comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
January 27th, 2010
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| It's a few hours before Apple reveals.... something, this afternoon, and I've got to say, it doesn't look good for Apple to me. There has been a tremendous, enormous, amount of hype concerning a rumored Apple iTablet/iSlate/iPad 10-inch diagonal touchscreen tablet as the big announcement. Apple, as is their habit, has been completely silent, neither confirming nor denying the rumors. Rumors of an Apple tablet have been running around for years, but this is the biggest hype storm I've seen, ever. Apple is in a lose-lose situation here. Nothing they could announce, but a tablet, can live up to the hype. But announcing a tablet puts an enormous amount of pressure for them to succeed with the tablet -- a task which is formidably difficult, considering no tablet has succeeded in the marketplace yet. They can't just say "we've a tablet", they have to say "we've an insanely great tablet", and be able to pull it off. And it would have to be insanely great even by Apple standards. The press invitation, splashed with 8 colors and saying "come see what we've created", doesn't say "iTablet" to me. There's too much color involved, especially splashed around. An iTablet doesn't splash colors around in an appropriately new way. To me, it's much more suggestive of a new suite of tools to help people be creative -- a new version of iLife, for instance. Minimally, it would have to be something which involves the splashes of color, and no one is going to be satisfied with 8 new colors of iPhone. That wouldn't be a creation, that would just be styling. It sounds like something new, something colorful, and something creative. I don't see this as an incremental development on existing products (not the next gen of iPhone, for instance). I can see it as a tablet if what they were introducing was a touchscreen tablet peripheral that was designed to work well with a new iLife suite, allowing you to edit sounds, images, movies, etc, in a more intuitive and faster way than using keyboard and mouse on a screen, but that's not what people are expecting. Given Jobs and his track record, I expect it to be something that'll make me go "Ooh, I want that!". That's also a point against the iTablet (and always has been). I don't see what will make me want to carry around a device too big to put in my pocket, yet too underpowered to work as a laptop, especially without a keyboard. It's possible Jobs can convince me, but it'll be a tough sell. | ||||||
| comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
January 22nd, 2010
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| I just saw (in a comment on Reddit) a tip about eating Cheetos with chopsticks. What do you think about that idea: Poll #1515129 Eating Cheetos with chopsticks? Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 13 What do you think of the idea of eating Cheetos with chopsticks?
View Answers Yeah, so? I've been doing it for years. What a neat idea! I'm going to have to try that! Don't you normally eat them with milk? Oh wait, that's Cheerios But licking.scraping orange goop off your fingers is an important part of the Cheetos experience! Doesn't matter, since I don't eat Cheetos anyway. Clicky! What about Popcorn?
View Answers Yeah, so? I've been doing it for years. What a neat idea! I'm going to have to try that! I've heard it's a good way to learn to use chopsticks Great for popcorn covered in butter or other greasy/dirty toppings It gets in the way of eating gobs of it, doesn't it? That's bad. It gets in the way of eating gobs of it, doesn't it? That's good. I think it'd require too much concentration on the popcorn, and would distract from the movie/book/etc Clicky! | ||||
| comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
0 (0.0%)January 20th, 2010
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| After a bit of effort and one false start, I've got a web cam that works on my machine. It's tricky, because... 1. In the past, there were no standards for how web cams were supposed to interact with the machine, so every web cam needed it's own driver. And the manufacturers only write drivers for Windows and/or Mac. 2. There's now a standard, but not everyone follows it, especially the cheap web cams. Many times, the standards are written to allow vendor-specific implementations of part of the standard. Sort of like saying "A book must contain a chapters and a table of contents that lists each chapter. The table of contents must be written in English, and each chapter must identify, in English, what language the chapter is written in. English is the preferred language for chapter contents". Most books will end up written in English, but it's perfectly possible for a standard-compliant book to have chapter 5 in Swahili. Of course the vendor-supplied drivers can deal with the Swahili-equivalent data. 3. Vendors say one thing on the box and say another to the machine. This is reasonable. For instance, the box I have says "LIVE! CAM Optia AF". To my machine, it says 041e:406d, which specifically identifies the electronics inside the camera. The Linux-UVC project says they support the "LIVE! CAM Optia AF", except they call it 041e:4058, which is a related, but different, set of electronics. It's entirely possible that the difference between the '6d revision and the '58 revision is that with the '6d revision chapter 5 is in Swahili, whereas with the '58 revision it's in English (using the metaphor in the previous paragraph). There is no way to identify which hardware revision is in the box from looking at the box, and decidedly no way from looking at the camera listing on Amazon.com. So to a large degree, there is no way of being guaranteed that the cam will work on Linux. The best you can do, short of taking a Linux laptop into the electronics store and telling them you want a working camera and you will test every cam they suggest until you find one, is to look at the list of known working cameras, buy a brand and model on the list, and hope they didn't change the internals enough to break it. It turns out that the '6d revision works, even though it's not on the list. | ||||||
| comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
January 18th, 2010
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| It's a common scene in a sci-fi/thriller show like The Dollhouse or The X-Files for the hero to bring a bit of electronics he has found in his house or car or wherever to an "expert", usually holed up in a poorly lit back-alley storefront, and demand that they identify it. 9 times out of 10, they identify it readily enough once the appropriate threats or bribes are made. Sometimes the identification is "This is seriously higher tech than I've seen before; you've got some bad-ass enemies", sometimes the identification is a bit more specific than that. But that's not how those scenes would really play out. Here's how it would play out: Hero: What is this? Expert: It's a custom circuit board with unmarked chips. Hero: I can see that; what does it do? Expert: I don't know. Hero: What do you mean, you don't know? Can't you find out? Expert: Look, see that chip there? Let me pull some stuff off my shelf... The chip on the board looks identical to this chip here, or this one, or this one, or this one. They are all black, that size, with this many pins in these locations. Each of these chips does something completely different than the others. Each of them has a part number printed on the top. Your chip doesn't. I can't tell, just by looking, if it's one of these 4 types, or a hundred others that are also packaged like that. Or a custom chip fabbed in that package as well. Expert: See that other unmarked chip? If I had to guess, I'd guess it's one of these (pulls a chip off the shelf). This is a FPGA, a "Field Programmable Gate Array". They're popular with designers because they can be customized after manufacture to perform virtually any complex logic function by writing what amounts to a computer program on them. An FPGA like mine could be performing encryption, selecting radio frequencies to monitor, or just about anything. Hero: Can't you reverse-engineer it or something? Expert: Sure, for $100/hr. It might take weeks, and even then there's no guarantee of success. Can you pay? But of course, even though that would be accurate, it's not dramatic, and would never be done. | ||||||
| comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
January 17th, 2010
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| This is a funny little instructional video entitled How Can We Have Sex?. While the subject matter may be not safe for some workspaces, the language is clean, nothing particularly risque is shown, and it's really all about the birds and bees. I'd have no qualms about showing it in my workplace. | ||||||
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January 14th, 2010
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Last night ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} sheherazahde, skitten, and a friend went to see Avatar in 3D. No spoilers...One of the common criticisms of Avatar is that the story is old, familiar, and oft retold. It's "Fern Gully", it's "Dances with Wolves", it's any one of the hundreds of films featuring an agent of the invaders going in amongst the natives, being accepted by them, switching sides and leading the natives to defeat the invaders. But that doesn't mean it wasn't told well. While the plot may be somewhat hackneyed, very little of the writing stuck out as poor. The only characterization flaws I noticed particularly were that the two main bad-guys were unrelenting in their badness, with no redeeming social value amongst them. For a movie hyped for 3D, calling their characters 2D would be generous. As others have stated, the world-building is excellent and richly detailed. The wide variety of plants and animals on Pandora made the place look real and lush, albeit alien. The same with the Na'vi; Their culture was somewhat well developed, and their physical movements were smooth and realistic, while their faces conveyed more subtlies of emotion than I think I've seen in CGI. I think Cameron, by designing Pandora and the Na'vi the way he did, managed to sidestep the uncanny valley. By making the Na'vi blue with very detailed and highly expressive non-human faces, it avoids the visceral reaction of "that human ain't quite right". The 3D was very impressive. It was present in almost every scene, but for the most part it wasn't intrusive. During one scene, I had a "Down in front!" reaction before I realized that the hands and arms blocking my view of the distant speaker were actually in the movie. There were very few "we did this to make people jump out of their seats" moments, except in the 3d trailers (I have no desire, intention, or willingness to see Pirhana 3D). The main effect of the 3D was to increase the sense of immersion in the world. It makes me more willing to watch 3d movies in the future. Technically, the 3d is done with alternating left/right images at 144fps (or 72fps per eye), so there was no flicker and the stereo separation was sharp and clear. Since they were using a single projector, there were no alignment problems between they eyes. I did notice that most of it had an exceptionally large depth of field, although they did play with that in a very early scene. On that note. Anyone know of anything interesting to do with a pair of circularly polarized filters of opposite chirality? | ||||||
| comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
January 12th, 2010
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I want to post my recipe for making coffee in my office. After some experimentation, I've found that one scoop of whole beans makes about 2 cups of coffee. This is after thinking that 1 scoop whole beans = 1 scoop ground beans, and 1 scoop ground beans = 1 cup coffee, and finding that everyone (but me) felt that was a bit strong. Experimentation showed that 6 scoops whole beans = 9 scoops ground, and a bit more tweaking. 12 scoops of beans overflows the grinder's output bin and nearly overflows the grounds basket in the coffee maker. Poll #1510646 How to make coffee in my office.... Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 8 Which recipe is clearer?
View Answers n scoops whole beans, ground, 2n cups water n cups water, n/2 scoops whole beans, ground To make 2n cups of coffee, grind n scoops of whole beans To make n cups of coffee, grind n/2 scoops of beans To make 8 cups of coffee, grind 4 scoops of beans. | ||||||
| comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
January 10th, 2010
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| Anyone willing to attempt a Skype-based 4th Ed. D&D campaign with me as DM? This weekend I headed to Binghamton to visit bloodsong1. sheherazahde had us watch The Gamers: Dorkness Rising, which all of us enjoyed, but it caused us to have a few realizations...None of us have played any D&D in a while, bloodsong1 hasn't ever been able to play a full campaign, and none of us have ever played 4th Edition. I've been reading Wil Wheaton's description of DMing his son and son's friends though their first adventure, and I remember how much fun it was.So yesterday the two of us ended up at Fat Cat Books and picked up a module and a copy of the Player's Handbook (they didn't have the DMG in stock). bloodsong1 now has a character (1st level helf-elf rogue). I've got the PH I/II, DMG, and MM on order from Amazon.com (34% off, better than the 10% off I could get at B&N, and besides the B&N in Vestal didn't have them in stock) and we are trying to figure out a way to play. She (and her gaming husband Wolf) live in Binghamton; I live in Ithaca. There's no way we can meet physically on a regular basis, so we are going to try to do this via Skype or other video-conferencing method. But we are shy of players. Bloodsong and Wolf are two, but that's not really enough. Ideally, I'd like 4 players. 2 characters is too small of a beginning party, and I've had bad luck in the past with players playing more than one character at a time and with the DM playing a player character. So I want two more players. I've emailed kinnerc a direct invite, since I've played with him before, but he hasn't responded in the 100 minutes I've given him so far. And even if he says "yes", that's just one. | ||||||
| comments: 11 comments or Leave a comment |
January 6th, 2010
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| ( Elimination TMI ) Did I take my meds this morning, or did I just think about taking my meds and verified that I took yesterday's meds, but didn't actually take them? Update: It appears that the multivitamin wasn't in my pills, and that the "W" slot of my pillbox is empty, but that doesn't explain the rest. | ||||
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January 4th, 2010
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| I now own my own copies of Oishinbo a la Carte, specifically, volumes 1, 2, 5, and 6. Volume 1 was "Japanese Cuisine", which I discussed earlier. Volume 2 is Sake, Volume 5 is Vegetables, and Volume 6 is "The Joy of Rice". As I mentioned last time, Oishinbo is a long-running manga series in Japan, and the Viz Media editions are thematic anthologies taken from the ongoing series. Again, I wish Viz would make available the series in chronological order, so that it is possible for me to follow the background plots. One advantage, however, is that it made it easy for me to buy volumes 5 and 6 in the store while waiting for volumes 1 and 2 to arrive from Amazon. The lack of a coherent continuing story meant I didn't miss anything by reading them "out of order". It is apparent, however, that Viz is not interested in making it easy to order the stories. There are no credits along the lines of "This work reprints stories which appeared in issues #14, #16, #35-40, and #54 of Big Comic Spirits". What I was able to find is that it appears that these volumes, as Oishinbo a la Carte, originally appeared in Japan a few years ago. This would suggest that the thematic anthology format isn't original with Viz, although Viz isn't publishing the volumes in order, either (Viz#1 is #20 is Japan, Viz#2 is 26, Viz#5 is 19, etc). There are no dates attached to the stories, except as may be mentioned within the stories, etc. This isn't just a problem with trying to follow the back-story. It is vitally missing information when trying to evaluate some of the information presented. One of the transparent purposes of this series is to be critical of food laws and public policy in Japan, and without knowing when the stories were written it is hard to tell if the criticism is still valid. On to the books. Sake: Although most of this book is about the rice-wine we know as sake, it should be known that the Japanese word sake (酒) means alcoholic beverage. Two of the chapters are about French wine, and one chapter is about the aged rice-based spirit from Okinawa known as Koshu (古酒). In it, we learn that Beaujolais Nouveau was originally drunk on the vineyard as a celebration, and wasn't intended as the main product -- and pales in comparison with traditional aged Beaujolais, and that ducks should be aged 10 days from slaughter to eating. We also learn that a "certain Japanese company" sold a sweetened, carbonated wine as "champagne", but that practice is now illegal (but when is "now"?). Six of the remaining 8 chapters are part of one long story in which our heros try to save a financially troubled sake brewery by arranging a bank loan. In order to do so, they have to convince the bankers that the brewery -- and by extension, the entire sake industry -- is worth saving. Along the way, we learn a lot of the dirty secrets of industrial sake production, many of them aided and abetted by government policies designed to boost tax revenue instead of sake quality. Tricks like: in WWII, to boost production, breweries were allowed to dilute sake with distilled alcohol, water, sugar, and MSG to triple the yield while using the same amount of rice, and most breweries never stopped. By adding rice bran syrup, they can add sugar while saying it's made just from rice, etc. We also learn of small breweries doing things the traditional way, and even embracing new technologies and techniques while remaining true to the purity of the sake. Discussed as well is the proper storage and handling of sake -- it is temperature and light sensitive, so bottles sold in brightly-lit warm stores have already been damaged (and, of course, the majority of sake is sold that way), but higher-end bottles sold in cool stores wrapped in paper on the shelf are good, etc. While this story is intended to educate about sake, it is also a major diatribe against the major breweries and the government policies which have lead to the decline in quality for sake. My assumption is that by publicizing these policies, he is hoping to influence public debate and have them changed. Some changes are mentioned in the story (such as the discontinuance of a "rating" system where any brewer could market his sake as "2nd grade", but to get it rated 1st or superior grade, he had to get it officially rated, and pay a higher tax rate. This left many smaller brewers having to choose between paying the tax to be rated, or trying to sell their sake as 2nd grade sake), but it was clear that there was still a lot to go. The author is careful to cover his bases when it comes to libel. Although he is generous with naming breweries when talking about the small breweries which do things the right way, he only describes the big breweries as "the ones you see advertising on TV" and similar. This book was much more of a polemic than the first book in the series. Had I read it first, I'm not sure I'd want to continue. It is informative and somewhat entertaining, but it is very heavy-handed with its message. The other books cover a wider variety of food and concentrate more on what can be done with it. While all the books include recipes, the recipes in this book barely use the "theme ingredient", and are dominated instead by the other ingredients. If you are interested in Japanese cooking, culture, and sake, I would recommend reading this book, but I'd only recommend buying it if you were collecting all of the Oishinbo a la Carte books. | ||||||
| comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
January 3rd, 2010
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| I'm reading the Clan of the Cats archives, and am at the point where they discuss the history of Dracula: namely that Lillith, the Queen of the Vampires and member of the Council of Three (the other two being the head werewolf and the head wizard/witch) killed Dracula in a massive tour de force during WWI, beheaded and cremated his remains, put his ashes in a silver urn and stored the urn in the vaults of the Council of Three. Needless to say, Dracula's supporters managed to steal the urn and resurrect Dracula, for what will be disastrous results. Sigh.... If I were to kill Dracula, knowing that with his remains he could be resurrected, I would not collect all his remains in one convenient place where everyone important knows where it is. Instead, I would take his ashes and run them through a mill, pulverizing them into powder. I'd take the ashes and secretly add it to the glass furnace at a large commercial company. Given the time frame (1915) I'd probably try to find a company that's making insulators for power or telegraph lines. Meanwhile, I'd take an equivalent amount of ashy powder, chosen such that it'd react chemically badly with the reagents in the resurrection spell, and put that in the prominent silver urn with "Dracula" written on the side stored in the secure location. That way, anyone who successfully gets past the defenses and steals the urn will get a nasty surprise when they try to resurrect Dracula. Meanwhile, his remains are scattered around the world locked into thousands of virtually impervious glass blobs. | ||||||
| comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
December 27th, 2009
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From the opening pages of a novel:I do not say the story is true, for I did not witness the happenings which it portrays, but the fact that in the telling of it to you I have taken fictitious names for the principal characters quite sufficiently evidences the sincerity of my own belief that it MAY be true. Let me get this straight... You (that is, the framing narrator, as the novel is told 3rd-person after the first 5 paragraphs) heard this tale, were presented with evidence of it's truth, and our evidence of your credulity is that you have changed the names deliberately so that we may not verify any of it ourself? Humbug. (So who amongst my loyal readers can identify the novel without resorting to Google?) | ||||||
| comments: 14 comments or Leave a comment |
December 23rd, 2009
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| I really didn't think that the term "grommet" for a ring of rope was all that obscure. A lot of people were dancing around Mel Gibson's portrayal of William Wallace in Braveheart, but apotimber was the only one to mention his name.So the costume is William Wallace, portrayed by Mel Gibson as a burley Scotsman in kilt and shirt, claymore, and half his face painted blue, carrying a rope grommet, or Wallace and Gromit. Should I have mentioned that there was a bad pun involved? | ||||||
| comments: 7 comments or Leave a comment |
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| It's rather subtle, which means there are few places to wear it, but... Me (or any other large, Scottish-looking man) in a great kilt and shirt, with a broadsword strapped to my back, face half-painted blue, carrying a ring made from rope without knots. Got that image in your head? Good. The question for you is.... What is it a costume of? | ||||||
| comments: 13 comments or Leave a comment |
December 20th, 2009
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| 15 years ago or so kinnerc and I headed (what was then) south from Cazenovia to Ithaca to visit friends. Whilst we were there, it started snowing, and snowing, and snowing, with a final result that our trip was extended because the roads were overwhelmed with snow. I believe in Cazenovia they got much less snow, and no one was out of work like we were. Right now, we are in Baltimore, where last night we got hit with 18+ inches of snow and were plowed in besides. We were supposed to head back up to Ithaca today, but many folks suggested we wait a day to make sure the roads were in good shape and our car was extractible. So we're heading home tomorrow and I'm missing an extra day of work besides. In Ithaca: 1" of snow, barely more than a dusting, and well-clear roads besides. So I guess I head south for blizzards? | ||||||
| comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
December 5th, 2009
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| skitten: What does "pedantic" mean?blaisepascal: Um... (thinking)skitten: Boring?blaisepascal: If "Boring" is all you get out of the types of answers Zadhe and I give...skitten: Overly-detailed! yes, overly-detailed! | ||||||
| comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
November 28th, 2009
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| I've watched the first 7 episodes of Alias. I believe I'm going to take it off my Netflix queue. The basic premise of the show is that Syndey Barstow was recruited by an international intelligence/espionage organization under the pretext that they were a covert branch of the CIA called "SD-6". Before the beginning of the series, she had been working for 6 years as an operative with the cover of being an account rep for an international bank (thus explaining the frequent foreign trips, her language training, etc). Her actual missions were short-term, a la James Bond and that ilk of agent. Soon after becoming engaged, she broke cover and told her fiancé she was a spy for the CIA. When SD-6 discovered this, they killed him. In fairness to SD-6, they did tell Syndey that would happen if her involvement with SD-6 leaked. She's enraged, discovers that SD-6 isn't really part of the CIA, and goes to the CIA to become a double agent to bring down SD-6. So far, the CIA has basically told her "Keep doing ops for SD-6, let us piggy-back onto it so we know what SD-6 is learning, and feed us info on SD-6". Oh yeah, her father also works for SD-6, was the one who let her know SD-6 wasn't CIA, and is also a CIA double agent, and she doesn't like or trust her father. I'll forgive the existence of three rival large, well-funded, private, international non-governmental spy organizations, none of which has a clear explanation as to how they were formed, are funded, etc. Shadowy organizations like this are common fodder in this genre, although usually it is established that the shadowy organization really is working for the government, even if it is uber-covert. Nikita (at least in the movie) worked for the government, as did Bourne, for instance. But the Alliance of Twelve (which SD-6 is part of), FTL, and the K Directorate have no governmental affiliation, they just are. I'll forgive the high-action, short-term ops they send Sydney on, despite her poor disguises, sloppy spycraft, and repeated run-ins with agents from the FTL and K Directorate whom she recognizes from previous ops. I'm not sure I've seen a single op where Sydney and handlers have been able to get in and out clean without setting off alarms, fighting guards, or getting captured and having to escape. And Sydney is supposed to be one of SD-6's top operatives! But without the ops, a lot of the action on the show would be gone. So it, too, is typical of the genre. But what I find hard to forgive is Sydney's attitude towards death. So far, in the seven episodes I've seen, she has lost her fiancé, an SD-6 agent in Morocco she's working with, 4 CIA agents, and her new SD-6 partner on an op. I do not believe we have seen her kill anyone, despite working for an organization perfectly willing to use lethal force, often having lethal force used against her, and working against rival organizations which have no qualms with killing. Each time she is faced with the death of someone around her, she freezes and is overcome with grief and anger. She believed, for 6 years, she was a field operative for a covert black-ops section of the CIA. She believed her operations were vital for national security. She is treated as one of the top operatives for her particular branch. She is told that if she broke cover, people would die. She routinely goes on dangerous ops where people try to kill her if she is caught. In the 7 episodes I've watched, she has been captured and tortured at least twice by people who have made no bones about killing her after they've extracted what they want from her. Are we expected to accept that she is not mentally capable of killing in self-defense and breaks down during an op if friendlies are killed? Are we expected to accept that after freezing in an op when someone is killed, SD-6 would immediately send her out on other ops instead of grounding her as unreliable? Is it reasonable for a super-spy to shoot the strap of the bag containing the McGuffin rather than the enemy super-spy escaping with the bag? For me, that stretches my suspension of disbelief too far. It's central to her motivation and character, yet it breaks genre convention without any explanation. I can accept that she's not an assassin, and isn't sent on missions where the object is to kill the target. But I can't accept that she can't deal with or in death at all. Wikipedia's synopsis of Syndey indicate that this changes in season 2, and she becomes a more "stereotypical" spy. It also indicates that by the end of season 2 everything in the synopsis above is history and not really relevant anymore. In a way, that sounds like the writers used season 2 to "reboot" the series and ditched most of the original premise. Perhaps the "new" Alias is better, but I'm don't see a need to watch that far to find out. | ||||||
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November 25th, 2009
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| My friend anarchist_nomad reminded me that today is Bohemian Rhapsody Day, and that the proper way to celebrate is to listen to the song 12 times. By coincidence, Neatorama today posted a link to a List of 15 Unique Bohemian Rhapsody covers. When I get home, I'm planning on watching all 15. I've already watched the Muppet's cover (released yesterday) twice already. | ||||||
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November 24th, 2009
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| Every morning I get up at 6am, check Google Reader, daily web comics, LJ Friends, and email. Then I try to nap until 7:45am. I eat breakfast with skitten, dress, recheck Google Reader and gmail, and try to get out of the house by 9am. I rarely make it. I walk to work, about a mile, and get there by 9:20 or so. I work until noonish, then go out for lunch alone for about an hour. I work until 6pmish, and walk home. I have about 8 coworkers, and I compartmentalize work and non-work. Every other Friday skitten picks me up for lunch to break in my new paycheck. In the evenings skitten and I sometimes watch movies or TV from netflix, sometimes she goes to a music jam, sometimes I read, always we peruse our online interests. skitten has made lots of friends online via various special interest groups and usually has about a dozen or more chat windows going. I read Google Reader, gmail, LJ, and a couple of other sites.Once a week or so sheherazahde comes over for dinner, and occasionally the two of us will go out for dinner elsewhen.Two friends I see face to face is a small world. Recently I've felt like the posts I make to LJ, the comments I make to blogs, forums, etc, and emails I make to mailing lists have been unread, certainly not replied to or acknowledged. It makes a small world even smaller. I like personal interaction with friends; I like seeing people, talking face to face. Despite the staggeringly vast amount of stuff I read online, I don't feel like what I write can substitute for a good conversation. I crave personal interaction, I find this small world stifling, crippling, confining. At the same time, I am introverted and find it hard to meet new friends, especially without some structure to contextualize it. When I went to college at RIT, there were times when I would barely leave my room, except to go to meals and to the gaming club meetings and games. I had bottles of urine in my wardrobe. Given the number of classes I missed, it's amazing I took away a B+ GPA. My first semester at UB, a few years later, was better -- at least I went to class and the bathroom -- but I wasn't involved in anything social. I showed up at the gaming club's first meeting, put my name down on the list, and left. leiacat, who did data entry for the club, was concerned my name was a prank.My world grew starting in my second semester at UB. I got involved in the gaming club, met friends who regularly played cards, met leiacat (and thus convinced her I was real), got involved with the ham radio club, got involved with the Independents (disabled student association), got involved with Alpha Phi Omega, and basically had a situation where there were lots of people on campus I could call friend, several places I could go and be surrounded by people I knew, who were usually good for conversation or games (when they weren't discussing the most recent Vampire LARP), interesting projects to do (I got to take pictures of a friend as she tried to use a women's bathroom stall), and lots of intriguing personal dramas among friends and occasionally myself to be engaged by.(This isn't to say that outside of college nothing was going on. I had friends in high school. Between RIT and UB I had a small, loyal number of friends I knew in Binghamton. kinnerc was a strong anchor that helped me get to UB after years of paying off debt, and continued to buoy me as we moved to Ithaca while I was going to UB. My involvement with USS Accord started ).After UB, kinnerc and I were in Ithaca. sheherazahde moved to Ithaca into kenshardik's apartment, and so I was surrounded by both old friends and new. I was involved in the SCA, with the USS Accord, the Ithaca pagan community. But with various waxing and waning, over time things shrank. I stopped going to USS Accord meetings about the time kinnerc and I broke up; the Ithaca pagan community defunked; We started having dinner and rituals with Zahde and a number of IC students at our house during one summer while the SCA was on break, and in the fall that conflicted with SCA meetings, so I fell out of the SCA. Eventually the students graduated and left, and I stopped being interested in ritual. The dinners remain, with just myself, skitten, and Zahde. People left. By late 2006 I was mainly involved with the Morris Dancers, the UU church, the folk song and country dance communities, and a small cadre of close friends ( skitten, sheherazahde, kenshardik, kinnerc, perhaps a couple of others). I had time then -- I was unemployed. Then I got a job, and skitten had a stroke (both within 2 months). Dancing disappeared, I wasn't that interested in the church, and my world got smaller.It has shrunk slowly since then. kinnerc moved out of town, then moved out of state. kenshardik got unsatisfied where his life was taking him, and made some radical changes for the better, but I rarely see him anymore. I've fallen out of the habit of going to jams (where I mostly read, anyway). It has shrunk to the point where it is now: Get up, read vast quantities of online information, work, do household stuff with skitten, periodically hang out with Zahde, sleep.It's hard for me to feel like the outsider. I've tried to go back to the SCA, but there's been a large change over of people, and I feel like the newcomer. When I went to a recent major USS Accord event, I knew a small few, mostly out of town folks from a decade+ ago, and I hung out with them as much as possible. I've tried going to a local Free Software User Group's meetings, but again felt like the outsider, as people broke into small groups I wasn't in. skitten will occasionally take me to meetings of people she's found via her newly minted special interests, but I find I have little in common and nothing clicks. This is a small city and there don't seem to be that many clubs or groups I can join I'd fit in. Sharing a car limits my mobility as well. I've often felt that living in a big city would help, as both the press of people would be comforting and there would be more opportunities for socialization.I love going to rbdarkly's gatherings because I'm with a crowd of friends. I love going to the Super Sekret gathering in October for the same reason. Going to Dance Flurry last year meant hanging out with Marnen&Millie&Zimmara and their friends. When we went to NEFFA, I got to hang out with Morris Dancers friends from Ithaca, Rochester, Boston, and all over, and we visted kinnerc and Will. I like going to Binghamton to hang out with Wolf, Queenie and their kids. These things are great; they satisfy a need I don't feel is met in my daily life.I recently posted that we were going to MD/VA for a week and change to visit family (in Richmond) and friends (in the DC/Baltimore area). I asked who on LJ, living in that area, wanted to meet up with me There are at least a dozen mutual LJ friends I know are from there. I got zero replies. That stung. My world shrank, sharply. Skitten has lined up a whole list of people to see, most of whom I don't know. I currently have 4 -- our host, my mother, leiacat and bfudlmint. And I'm not even sure how into it the last two are. I'm working on two more.My world is too fucking small. And I don't know what to do about it. | ||||||
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November 23rd, 2009
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| According to Wikipedia, Oishinbo (美味しんぼ) is a long-running manga, dating back to 1983, In Japan, it has been republished in over 100 collected volumes, selling over 100 million total copies. It has also been made into an anime series totalling 136 episodes. The series title roughly translates to "The Gourmet", and is about a newspaper reporter tasked with a series about the "Ultimate Menu", a model meal representing the pinnacle of Japanese food. US Rights were bought by Viz, who released the first translated volume, Oishinbo: Japanese Cuisine: A la Carte, in January 2009. I found it in the library yesterday and checked it out. Viz decided, when doing the translation, to not present the series in chronological order, but rather group the stories thematically. This first volume consists of 10 stories highlighting the essence of Japanese Cuisine, with "courses" (chapters) titled "The Secret of Dashi", "The Right To Be A Chef", "The Ultimate Etiquette", etc. I am of mixed opinion about this. On the one hand, I would like to read the story as published, but on the other hand, I didn't notice the disjointedness too much. Each course stood well by itself. It's possible that Viz made the editorial decision to choose stand-alone stories when picking their "A la Carte", and that the full series is less episodic. This is a book which would, in my opinion, appeal to the Japanophile and the Foodie alike. Centered around Japanese Cuisine, the stories delve deeply into the heart of what makes really good food good -- the craft, the ingredients, the culture, etc, surrounding it. In one story, a foreign food critic challenges the notion that Japanese "Cooking" is meaningful, since cooking is all about applying techniques to food, while Japanese "cooking" is about emphasizing the naturalness of the ingredients -- in other words, doing nothing to them. Citing sashimi -- the centerpiece of many Japanese haute cuisine -- as just sliced raw fish, and thus not "cooking", he challenges the heros to show him otherwise. The rest of the story features a chef preparing sashimi using three very different techniques (four if you count the "control" sashimi he makes for comparison purposes), explaining each technique in terms of how and why, until the critic admits that sashimi is proper "cooking"[*]. While all the stories highlight the epitome of good Japanese cooking and eating, not all of them involve haute cuisine. One story features a contest centered on the traditional Japanese meal of rice and miso soup; another examines the manufacture of traditional chopsticks, while yet another is filled with dishes the main character exclaims only the lowest class of restaurant would serve (and then explains to the chef's satisfaction that he understands what the chef was aiming for better than any of the other experts at the meal). Many of the stories have B-plots, and there are many recurring characters. This is a problem with this particular format of the story, since the a-la-carte format loses their ongoing stories. In the Ninth Course, one of the characters has a boyfriend, while in the Tenth Course, she's married and pregnant. Clearly the stories are out of order and cover years of time. Two of the main characters, YAMAOKA Shiro and KURITA Yuko, are friendly coworkers in parts of the book, married in other parts, and finish off the book being chastised for arguing-flirting with each other. We don't get to see their relationship grow (although what we do see implies that it does), nor do we see what happens to a lot of the other characters who are introduced. This is, in my opinion, the biggest flaw with the book. A central conflict in the series is between the main character, YAMAOKA Shiro (a newspaper food reporter and critic), and his father KAIBARA Yuzan, a prominent artist and gourmand. Yamaoka blames his father's impossibly-high food standards for driving his mother to her death, while Kaibara refuses to forgive Yamaoka for leaving the household (especially the way he left). Because they are both heavily involved in the high-end food scene, and both travel in similar social circles, they have opportunity to conflict a lot. When a restaurateur is distraught because another customer has sent back his dashi three times causing the (replacement) cook to storm out, Kaibara volunteers to step into the kitchen, sees the problem, and makes a satisfactory dashi. When the picky customer, Kaibara finds out the satisfactory dashi was made by Yamaoka, however, it isn't good enough and he storms out. In the story about chopsticks, Kaibara and Yamaoka run into each other and Kaibara chastises Yamaoka on a vitally important piece of etiquette that no one else at the meal knew about. Kaibara appears in half the stories in the book. The book also includes a 3-page essay by the author titled "What is Japanese Cuisine", 14 pages of translators notes, and recipes for two dishes in the book. I had an incredibly unusual experience reading the essay. The book is presented in Japanese-fashion, in that the right side is read first, then the left, and one turns the pages "backwards" to read it. The prose essay was no exception, with the first page of English in a two-page spread on the right, and so forth. What I found unusual is that despite both Japanese and English being read from the top of the page down, I wanted to read the essay from the bottom of the page up. I don't know how, or why, my brain made that decision, but each page I turned to required me to consciously acquire the top of the page. Overall, I would say it is book well worth reading, and at $13/book list price (less via Amazon.com), I am seriously considering buying my own copies. Each book is 5"x7" R-to-L paperback format, with 275pp and heavy cardstock covers, so the price is a bargain. Amazon.com lists 7 volumes to date: Japanese Cuisine (1/09), Sake (3/09), Ramen and Gyoza (5/09), Fish, Sushi, and Sashimi (8/09), Vegetables (9/09), The Joy of Rice (11/09) and Izakaya - Pub Food (1/10). [*] Others may disagree. At least one food scientist states that cooking specifically involves the use of heat to transform food. By this definition, fermented pickles and sauerkrauts, traditional unheated cheeses, etc are not cooked, but that isn't a condemnation of them. The definition of "cooking" used in this story broader than that, and basically covers any transformative technique to prepare food. | ||||||
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November 21st, 2009
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| There's a storefront church in Ithaca prominently labeled the "Jesus Only Apostolic Church of God". I have wondered for a while exactly what theology they were advertising with that name. I think I've figured it out, and think they are some form of Oneness Pentacostal. Anyone have any other ideas? While talking to a friend today about what we thought that church name signified, we got talking about Apostolic Succession. After a bit of initial confusion (where the ideas of the Petrine Doctrine were muddled in the mix) I mentioned that the RCC recognizes the apostolic succession of clergy in schizms from RC -- specifically that Rome recognizes Anglican ordinations and thus makes it relatively easy for Anglican bishops and priests who convert to Catholicism to take up parishes and diocese without retaking the sacrament of Holy Orders. I also mentioned that the RCC makes a distinction between having the ability to successfully administer Holy Orders (which a schizmatic bishop can do), and therefor being able to create priests and bishops who can perform transubstantiation and other things only bishops and priests can do, and having the authority to do so. A priest ordained by a schizmatic bishop can convert bread and wine into body and blood, but isn't supposed to. There are specific terms used in Roman Catholicism to refer to these two states. I know one is "valid" -- an Anglican Ordination is considered "valid" by Rome -- but I can't remember the other term, referring to having the authority. Can anyone help me? | ||||||
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November 20th, 2009
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| Is it just me, or did the Commercial Christmas Season start very early this year? | ||||||
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November 12th, 2009
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| ...my Dr's office is doing enough without them. When I saw my Doctor in September, I asked him about a flu shot. He said it was a good idea, and suggested I make an appointment to get one. I did, for the same time I was coming in for fasting blood work, later that week. The office called to reschedule, for mid-October. In mid-October, the office called to reschedule, for mid-November. Just now, the office called to reschedule, for late December (solstice, actually). If I get the flu before getting the vaccine, do I get any compensation? | ||||||
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November 11th, 2009
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| skitten and I are planning a trip to MD (the Baltimore area) and VA (Richmond area) from 11 December to 20 December. Our plans currently are to drive south on 11 December and crash at Mad Mike's the night of the 11-13th, head to Richmond the evening of the 14th, visit gordon92151 until the 16th, drive back up to Mike's and stay there until the 20th, when we would drive home to Ithaca.There are a lot of people we'd like to see while we're in the area, which I'm not going to try to list for fear of leaving someone out. Suffice to say that if we've discoursed with civility in the past and are around, I'd probably like to meet up with you. Unfortunately, I don't know people's schedules, or were people are, or the best way to meet up with everyone. Logistics are a pain when working 5 hours away with limited information. I am asking for help. Does anyone who lives in the MD/VA area have any ideas that might go into a reasonable itinerary? | ||||||
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| The War is Over, We Live, Let Us Celebrate and Fight No More. | ||||||
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November 8th, 2009
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| I blame acelightning... | ||||||
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November 3rd, 2009
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| My throat culture came back positive for strep. I was advised by my doctors office to make sure I take the full run of antibiotics and get back to them if things didn't get better. | ||||||
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November 2nd, 2009
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| This past weekend I hadn't been feeling my best. I had a sore throat and occasional chills, and fatigue, etc. The fatigue, etc could be explained by poor sleeping habits and similar lifestyle sundry. The sore throat was more worrisome. What I didn't have: headache, fever, nasal congestion, excessive sneezing or coughing, massive body aches, or anything egregiously debilitating. So I didn't believe it was the flue. In fact, I wouldn't have been surprised if a good nights sleep, getting current on my hypertension and diabetes meds, taking a long, hot, shower and immediately getting into warm, clean, clothes would make me feel 100% better. (On a side note, the washing machine we bought on Friday was delivered and installed today, so there should be less issue about warm, clean, clothes in the future). It almost did -- it made me feel confident about my health to go to Binghamton this last weekend -- but not confident enough to do things like drink from the same chalice as everyone else or similar potentially germ-spreading behaviors. But the sore throat didn't go away. If anything, it got worse. It was worst in the mornings, got better over the course of the day, and then was real bad in the mornings again. It feels crunchy, and swallowing can feel like I'm dragging something hard and sharp over it. I didn't go to Bound For Glory last night, telling them that I didn't feel like I was contagious, but not wanting to take a chance. This morning, I phoned my boss telling him that I'd rather go to the doctor than to work. I saw my doctor nominally at 3:10 this afternoon, and spent most of the day sleeping until then. When I got the doctors, they immediately gave me a mask to put on, but within a couple of minutes of seeing the doctor, he told me I could take it off -- it's not right for H1N1, and it doesn't even sound right for anything viral. He had no comments about my ears or nose after he looked in them, and he said my lungs sounded clear. My throat is inflamed, and he seemed concerned about the lymph nodes in the neck. He said there's a number of possibilities (he mentioned strep, I mentioned staph, he mentioned another bacterial possibility that I hadn't heard of and can't remember), took a throat swab to test for strep, and prescribed azythromycin. I'm cleared to work tomorrow, and there seems little risk of contagion. I've already taken the initial dose of antibiotics, and I've 4 more days to go with it. I expect I'll probably be feeling a lot better by tomorrow morning or Wednesday, but I'm not stupid enough to stop taking the antibiotics simply because I feel better. | ||||||
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October 26th, 2009
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The Language Log blog recently had a discussion on the question Is Irony Universal?. To set up the discussion, he clarified exactly what he was talking about:First, let's clarify the terminology. For the purposes of this discussion, irony means "A figure of speech in which the intended meaning is the opposite of that expressed by the words used", and not "dissimulation of ignorance as practiced by Socrates in order to confute an adversary". My guess is that Socratic irony is less likely to be a cultural universal — it seems to have caught the attention of Socrates' contemporaries as something new and unexpected — but in any case, this is a different question. I hadn't necessarily seen all those definitions of irony before, and if "Wonderful!" and "Good job!" are examples of irony and not sarcasm (which he defines as "A sharp, bitter, or cutting expression or remark; a bitter gibe or taunt"), I've probably called way too many things sarcasm and not irony. Still, it remains an amazing bit of (dramatic) irony that the song "Isn't It Ironic" has so little examples of irony (although I suspect the line "yes I really do think" would qualify as sarcasm). | ||||||
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October 23rd, 2009
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| I now have a Google Wave account. Does anyone have an idea what it's good for? My observation is that Reggae music in general and Reggae covers of Pink Floyd specifically are not conducive to a productive work environment. I just slouch back, feel my mind go fuzzy, and chill to the beat. I dined at WildFire, the new restaurant in Ithaca replacing Lost Dog. 'Twas good, caused me to take home my main course, fuller review upon request. Everyone says "Get a flu shot! get a flu shot!" My doctor's office has said (twice) "We need to reschedule your flu shot, can you come in 3 weeks later?". I hope I get the shot before the flu. | ||||||
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October 5th, 2009
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| What LPs (flat platters of black polyvinyl chloride plastic approximately 30cm in diameter upon which approximately 22minutes of sound is recorded in an analog format in a long spiral groove on each side, when rotated at the design speed of 1 revolution every 1.8 seconds) sound better when played at 45RPM, in your opinion? Experimentation in our office has preliminary results that instrumental works sound faster, but not much different (for instance, Kraftwerk is reputed to sound like Daft Punk when played at 45, reggae sounds like reggae, and piano instrumentals sound completely and utterly unchanged). There is a certain amount of chipmunks-effect with vocal stuff. | ||||||
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September 29th, 2009
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| When we got home tonight our cat, Willow, was sitting under my chair making a grunting sound with every breath. She continued to do so even after I picked her up and put her on a much softer surface. Calls to emergency vets suggested that she should be brought in, and after searching around for an inexpensive vet open at 9pm that could take her we finally took her to Cornell Companion Animal Hospital. As soon as the triage vet saw her and picked her up she wanted to whisk her away to be put on oxygen due to her labored breathing. The vet told us that this was a major quality-of-life issue, and that she was suffering with the breathing, even in the oxygen. The two most likely causes for this sort of issue were congestive heart failure (there was a noticeable heart murmur and liquid sounds in the lungs) or cancer. It would be expensive to find out what it was, and there was a small probability of being able to do anything once they did find out. In the mean time, she would be suffering with the breathing all the time. She also confirmed that if we hadn't brought Willow in tonight, we wouldn't have been able to have brought her in tomorrow. We let her go. We are now a 3 cat household. | ||||||
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September 28th, 2009
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| A caller on Car Talk this week asked the guys to confirm something her co-worker had told her. As a person involved in emergency medicine (I didn't catch her exact involvement) she often sees people brought in suffering from CO poisoning from boating. Again, I didn't catch exactly how come fishers/boaters get exposed to CO to the point of needing medical care. One of her coworkers commented that the patients could have gotten the same effect by simply sitting in their car in a closed garage for an hour or so and bypassed the sunburns, boats, etc. Another of her coworkers (a resident) countered that modern car's emission systems are so good that one could run your tank dry in a closed garage and there would be hardly any CO buildup. The Car Talk guys sided with the resident, noting that nowadays the needles on the emissions testers barely budge when testing a car, as compared with the old days when no emissions tester was needed to tell that lots of bad stuff was coming out the tailpipe. They suggested that you would be more likely to die from oxygen deprivation then CO poisoning. Below the cut are my calculations and thoughts on the matter... ( c'mon, you know you want to see the math... ) Should I send it to the Car Guys? | ||||||
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September 20th, 2009
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| A new Five Guys Burger and Fries place opened in Ithaca today. Five Guys is a relatively understated national chain specializing in, well, burgers and fries. Their menu consists of burgers, "little burgers", hot dogs, fries, and grilled cheese. The burgers come in hamburger, cheeseburger, bacon hamburger, and bacon cheeseburger, with two patties in the regular burgers and one patty in the little burgers. Their pitch is good ingredients -- all beef burgers hand-made from fresh ground beef (80% lean), fries cut on site from sacks of Idaho potatoes, kosher hot dogs, etc -- and few frills. There are a large number of toppings, all of which are free, and they provide roasted peanuts (in shell) as an appetizer while you wait (self-serve). When I got there at 11:30ish it was packed, with the line stretching a good thirty-feet from the counter to the door (as it had opened in Ithaca only 30min earlier). It didn't take long to make it to the counter, but I probably spent more time waiting for my grilled cheese (with mushrooms and tomato) and fries than waiting to order. It gave me plenty of time to observe how they worked, as the kitchen is completely exposed to the dining area. It was very assembly-line oriented. There were five stations, which I'll call "veggie grill", "meat grill", "cold", "assembly", and "bag&fries". It was easiest to watch the assembly person (all the stations had multiple people working it, except assembly, and she was not a bottleneck), as she was a single person and most exposed. When an order came in, it goes to both cold and the grill; the cold takes buns and puts tomatoes, lettuce, etc on them, puts them on foil sheets, and passes them down, one whole order at a time, to the assembly person. She arranged them to her liking, and waited for the meat. When the grill was done with patties, a grillman would come over with patties (with and without cheese) to put on the waiting prepped buns. Then she would close up the sandwich, wrap it in foil, label it with either the order slip or a numbered sticker (indicating that this is sandwich 1, 2, 3, etc in the order), and once an order is ready passes it to the bag&fry station. The order slip is pulled off the sandwich and slapped onto the top bag on a stack, which is opened, the sandwiches loaded, and the cup of fries filled and added. Then they take a measured amount of fries and dump it in the bag on top of everything. Once that's done, they take the bag to the counter and call out the order number. My opinion? The grilled cheese was moderately better than I expected. It was grilled on a bun (not sliced bread), using standard yellow American cheese. The cheese wasn't fully melted. I suspect the fresh tomato and (canned or grilled, not fresh) mushrooms did a good job of making what would have been horrid acceptable. The fries were pretty good. I'll try the cajun fries next time. I also suspect things might be faster at another time. | ||||||
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September 19th, 2009
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| I've been watching some Dr.Who-and-related I haven't seen before lately. I've watched the first two stories from Sarah Jane Adventures over the past few days, and today Zahde brought over "Delta and the Bannermen" and "The Infinite Quest". For those more into Who than I... Is Sarah Jane's address (13 Bannerman Rd) a coincidence or an homage (or, worse, foreshadowing). Another question: Was "Delta and the Bannerman" typical of McCoy-era Dr.Who? What was the fan feeling concerning Mel as a Companion? "The Infinite Quest" was pretty good. | ||||
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| Now heave to and hand over your cargo or we'll sink your ship. Wait, that's not in the proper spirit... I know... "Hello, I am calling to negotiate on behalf of the men who have taken over your ship. They wish to get $50,000,000 in return for the safe release of your crew, cargo, and ship...." What? That's not how pirates talk? | ||||||
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| Body aches, check, especially in arm and shoulder muscles, some in kidney region, some in legs, with no apparent cause. Sore throat, mildly, but not much. Fever, nope. Runny/stuffy nose, no more than usual, definitely breathable, seemingly dry. Chills, nope. Fatigue, not really. If things change, I'll let you know. | ||||
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September 13th, 2009
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| skitten just came home crying from a music jam a couple of hours before it's end. Apparently, the hostess of the jam asked her to move to a different seat outside the main circle "so the musicians can join the circle". If you are unaware, skitten went to college at a high-ranked music school, competed for 13 years in a Barbershop chorus and quartet, attends as many jams as she can, but doesn't play nearly as much as she had since her stroke 3 years ago. Currently she plays hammered dulcimer and voice, as there aren't that many 1-handed instruments she can either afford or is willing to play.She considers herself to be a musician, and to be asked to move to make room for "the musicians" really hurt. | ||||||
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September 5th, 2009
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| I just finished watching Funky Forest: The First Contact, an unusual Japanese film I got on Netflix. It isn't bad; if it were bad, I wouldn't have watched the whole movie. But it is...strange. An IMDB reviewer described it as like a David Cronenberg comedy. My feeling is that it maintains the tight, plot-driven focus of some great American movies like Amazon Women on the Moon and Kentucky Fried Movie. The movie features segments of stories, ranging from a few seconds to several minutes (the 150+minute movie had 44 chapters, which means the average chapter is 3m24s long, and each chapter corresponds to a break/jump from one segment to another). Many of the segments feature recurring story-lines or people, so there aren't 44 stories in this collection. This is the work of 3 directors, each claiming credit for a total of 21 of the segments, and another 22 credited to "Interval" on the DVD (all three directors plus Interval claim credit on segment 44, "End Roll"). One director, 石井克人 (ISHII Katsuhito) directed four of the recurring stories. "Guitar Brothers" is about three "brothers" who live together who are apparently decidedly unattractive to women (for different reasons). I wouldn't say there was an overall plot to that story. "Anime Brothers" is about two brothers who are doing all the animation for an anime ostensibly written by Pero, a small dog (the elder of the brothers finds the situation with Pero and his interpreter to be "fishy", and believes the interpreter is the real director). We do get to see the finished animation. With "Babbling Hot Springs Vixens" it becomes quickly clear that the vixens are babbling more than the springs are. "HOMEROOM !!!!!!!!!" features the morning announcements of different classmates during a homeroom session in school -- for an oddly configured class. In addition to these four stories (ranging from 2 segments for Anime Brothers to 5 for Guitar Brothers), ISHII also directed two standalone segments, one featuring the "Mole Brothers", the other featuring a girl named Hataru. Overall, he gets credit for 65m of the movie. The second director, 三木俊一郎, MIKI Shunichiro, is responsible for some of the more bizarre imagery in the work, as his three segments all involve odd prosthetics or puppetry of distinctly... well, it's clear that they are alive, and it's clear in two of the segments that they are considered normal in the world of the segments, but they are clearly not a product of our world. If you look at the DVD cover, you'll see in the upper left a pink thing in the upper left and two guys dressed in yellow fursuits. Those are from his segments. "Wanna Go For A Drink" is about an odd encounter a schoolgirl has in the school hallway. "Youth Classroom" takes place in the youth classroom of a school, while "After School Club" is based, well, you can probably guess. It's hard to say that there is an overall plot or theme, or reason, for these segments. Overall his segments account for 25m. The third director, ANIKI, clocks in with one 46m story in three segments. This story, "Notti&Takefumi", is probably the most coherent story of the bunch, centered around two characters: a real cutie named Notti and a young schoolteacher named Takefumi. Notti was a student at Takefumi's school, but now they are/are not dating. This is the central conflict of this story -- Takefumi loves Notti and wishes they acted more like a couple (including going on a world trip together) while Notti has no real desire to be a couple. The first segment sets up their relationship, while the other two segments are them each telling about a dream they had. While the imagery and motifs of the dream sequences are fantasy, it's clear in the setup that they are dreams (the three segment titles are "Notti&Takefumi -- Prologue", "...-- Takefumi's Dream" and "...-- Notti's Dream"). The struggle of Notti&Takefumi's relationship is clearly reflected in their dreams: Takefumi spends his dream following the direction of Notti, while begging her to express her feelings towards him, while in Notti's dream Takefumi doesn't appear at all. The "fourth director", Interval, has 22 segments, including a 3-minute intermission, taking a total of 7m46s, averaging 21s each (without the intermission, it's 13.6s each). With just a couple of exceptions the intervals are extensions or cuts from the other stories. The stories are slightly interlocked via shared characters. Takefumi appears in "After School Club", while many of the characters across several stories meet up for a rather disastrous "Single's Picnic". Hataru is in the "Youth Class Room", and one of the Guitar Brothers is a coach in the After School Club. While watching bits of it again to write this write-up, I noticed things which escaped me in the first viewing -- characters whose significance wasn't apparent until later in the film, for instance. The DVD features the ability to watch the movie in order, or to watch just the segments which belong to each director. The latter ordering provides a somewhat more coherent picture, and is how I was able to break things out by director, but it isn't a real substitute to watching the movie in it's released order. | ||||||
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September 2nd, 2009
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| I want to upgrade my Mac to the most up-to-date Mac OS X it'll support: Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger". I've already asked one friend and he thought he had an appropriate set of disks, but it turned out he had 10.3 "Panther", not "Tiger" (all his machines are currently running "Leopard", and he had to search to find the old install disks. Anyone know where I can get Tiger? | ||||||
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| Back in July I got another Dreamwidth invite code. It's been sitting in my inbox since. Anyone want it? | ||||
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August 30th, 2009
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| Idina Menzel is no Elaine Paige. | ||||||||
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August 11th, 2009
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| In my last journal entry about the Investor's Business Daily's editorial board, I posited two compelling opinions regarding their editorial about the House health care plan. I suggested that either (a) they were incompetent, or (b) they were deliberate liars pushing an ideological agenda. Sensing that (1) was unlikely, I leaned towards (2). Evidence has surfaced that, well, perhaps I was a bit hasty in overlooking (1). In an editorial which has since been corrected online, the IBD apparently claimed that: "People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless." Obviously, since it has been corrected, the basic problem with this has been pointed out to them. But they should have caught it before it got to print in the first place. The basic problem is simple: For the entire time that Stephen Hawking has been suffering from ALS he has been under the care of the NHS, the very service the IBD claims would value his life as worthless and let him die, a fact that any cursory research on Professor Hawking would have revealed. Sure, he speaks with an American accent, but he's English, through-and-through. So perhaps incompetence is not as unlikely as I thought. | ||||||
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August 7th, 2009
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| In case people were wondering what I've been working on, check out this press release | ||||||
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August 5th, 2009
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| There is a load of laundry in the washer. Initial indications indicate that the washer needs more supervision than it has needed in the past, and a new one is probably a good idea soon, but it washes again. I'll see soon if it spins. The part necessary to fix it cost under $11. Update: It doesn't spin. In fact, when it gets to a spin phase, it just seems to stop. I can put it to a wash cycle, and it runs fine, until it gets to a spin. Then it stops. It spun fine when I first tried it out. I suspect that the shaking of the first full wash cycle jiggered a connection. Possibly the connection to the lid switch. Either way, it's buggered for tonight. | ||||
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August 3rd, 2009
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| Funny, the pictures online of direct-drive couplers for washing machines like mine don't seem to have the big crack/gap in the side of one of the three pieces like I see in the one in my hand. (I can get a new coupler online for under $15+shipping, I'll check the local appliance repair shop first.) | ||||
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| A quick scan of the websites for Lowes', Best Buy, Sears, and Home Despot show that the apparent going rate for a new low-end laundry washer is about $300, presumably plus tax and installation. | ||||
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Buddha Buck
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