| Meow Meow purr....
Purr, meow, mur, meow -- HISS!!!!
Bark, bark, bark, bark, bark.
(Now is that a haiku or a senryu?) | comments: Leave a comment   |
| I've managed to get completely caught up on my backlogged podcasts (well, I have 1 hour remaining, a This American Life, a 60-Second Science, and an NPR News Summary, but practically caught up). This will not do. It means I'll have nothing to listen to over the weekend.
I'm looking for suggestions.
My preference is for relatively short (less than the length of a walk to work, or about 15min max) and based on science, technology, news, or trivia.
Examples of existing podcasts are Ben Goldacre's Bad Science; BrainStuff and Stuff You Missed In History Class by HowStuffWorks.com; Randy Cohen's Ethicist; Skeptic's Guide To The Universe and Skeptic's Guide 5X5 by the New England Skeptical Society; Stephen Fry's PODGRAM; More Or Less: Behind the Stats from the BBC; News Summary Podcast, Car Talk, On Science, Planet Money, Story of the Day, Sunday Puzzle, and Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! all from NPR; This American Life from PRI; Radio Lab from WCNY; and 60-Second Psych and 60-Second Science from Scientific American. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| an IM conversation:
Me: How's Tiger doing? Is he still in the music room?
Skitten: little glutton ate almost all of the tuna *lol*
Skitten: he was really really hungry
We'll see how this goes. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| One of our cats (Tiger, for those keeping track) has been getting thinner lately, but has been just about as energetic as usual, doesn't seem to be in pain, etc. The main behavioral change we've noticed is (a) he's been begging for attention more often, in the way he used to do mainly to inform us that the cat water bins needed refilling, and (b) he's been after human food leftovers aggressively, when he never really did that before. Skitten wants to take him to a $10 vet clinic, and I've encouraged her to make an appointment.
Skitten suggested that I take a look at his teeth, to see if he has any obvious dental issues which could be making eating painful for him. I did that this morning, briefly (I haven't mastered the art of holding a cat's mouth open, so I looked during the brief times I got it open before he closed it again) and saw one tooth where I would have expected to see four. Perhaps I didn't look well enough. So our initial diagnosis is that he's not eating the dry food we feed the cats because he's lost teeth and can't chew it. When I left this morning, we had segregated him away from the other cats with a plate filled with a can's worth of tuna, and he seemed to be eating away at it.
He's about 13-14 years old, and seems otherwise in good health. With luck, feeding him wet food will fill him out again, but putting him on a separate diet from the other three is going to be a challenge. | | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment |
| This morning I'm going in for a fasting blood draw. Which means I can't eat until probably close to 9ish. Of course, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) skitten and I usually eat breakfast together, and this is a routine she doesn't like to break. So, today she wants me, as hungry as I am, to watch her eat breakfast before I leave for the doctors. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| In case you are the dieting type, you ought to know that you can put recipes into Wolfram Alpha and get back nutritional information in the form of a standard US Nutritional Information label.
For instance, my morning breakfast usually consists of a 3-egg cheese omelet and half a banana. Searching on Wolfram Alpha for 3 eggs + 1T olive oil + 2oz Cheddar Cheese + 1/2 banana yields the results that it's a 571 Calorie meal, with 27g protein, 15g carbs (2 of which are dietary fiber), and gives me 24% of the RDA of Vitamin A (based on a 200Cal diet), among other things. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| That was the subject line on a piece of spam I got today at work. That spawned a discussion of who has died in hell. Most people who go to hell die first, so they don't die in hell.
Orpheus, et al., have gone to hell and back, but they didn't die in hell. We couldn't come up with anyone who was known to die in hell.
Can anyone think of anyone who has died in hell? | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| A few things I've noticed so far that I haven't seen listed as improvements on any site yet...
1. Better support for smart playlists. I'm assuming it's a smart playlist feature: I have a smart playlist which is basically "All podcasts I haven't played yet, from newest to oldest". Before today, if I stopped listening to that playlist and went and played something else, I'd lose where I was in that play list, and might end up having to search for the last thing I listened to. The playlist would only be updated when I synced my phone. Now, the playlist updates by removing things I've listened to. I'm assuming this is because of the playlist definition.
2. New iPod controls. When listening to a podcast, there are now three new controls. I can now send an email with a link to the podcast to folks, suggesting they listen to it; I can jump back 30 seconds; and I can change the playback speed (between half, full, and double speed), which doesn't change the pitch of the speech, but does change the pace.
I'm wondering what other little surprises and improvements are in store. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space, listen..."
I saw the above quote attributed to "Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" today and it irked me. In DA's novel, the quote was attributed to The Guide, and in the radio play, The Narrator was reading it from The Guide.
Another example would be:
The first time I was a drill instructor I was too inexperienced for the job--the things I taught those lads must have got some of them killed. War is too serious a matter to be taught by the inexperienced.
I have seen other things from the exact same source attributed to Robert Heinlein, but Heinlein (to the best of my knowledge) was never a DI. It seems to me that it should be more appropriate to attribute it to Lazarus Long, a character of Heinlein's, but I've seen it more often attributed to Heinlein.
On the other hand, I have never heard of anyone attributing "Live Long and Prosper" to Roddenberry, but rather to Spock. "When you have eliminated the impossible..." is cited from Sherlock Holmes more than form Doyle, and there are many other cases where it is typical to give credit to the character who said it, not the author.
Are there rule for this sort of thing? How would you prefer to see the HHGG and TEFL quotations attributed? | | comments: 7 comments or Leave a comment |
| TV Tropes is a huge timesink. It took me 40 minutes to write that last sentence, because I made the mistake of double-checking the URL.
(aaaand another 8 minutes lost...) It's rather addictive. It doens't cover just TV, but also anime/manga, film, literature, music, etc. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| My finances are almost under control. I've got an auto bill-paying system taking care of my bills with about 50% of my biweekly pay. I don't have any current creditors screaming down my throat (long-past creditors, which I need to fish out of my credit report and do something about, yes, but not current creditors).
That's the good part. The bad part is that the other 50% isn't getting saved, but rather spent, and spent even somewhat frivolously, mostly on more expensive food than I really need. Changes in my habits would free up cash to save, and keep me from being in the situation I'm in now.
My bank balance is $0.97, having frittered away all of my last paycheck already. I'm at home rather than out seeing a friend who's in town that I haven't seen in a few years (since the last time I saw her, she's gotten married and moved to Oregon, not necessarily in that order). I feel it's rude to go to a commercial/service establishment (in this case, a bar/club) with no intent to engage in commerce.
The irksome thing is that I should have money. Today was payday, but payroll had some glitches and was submitted to the direct-deposit folks a day late (Thursday instead of Wednesday), and my pay hasn't hit the bank yet. If I'm lucky, it'll be processed tomorrow and I'll have money to do things then. If I'm unlucky, it'll be Monday.
In the meantime, I can't get or do things I want, like see old friends, or get clear garbage bags to pack recycling in, or get new books, or go out to eat, or... I've said that brass in pocket is a great anti-depressant for me, and it's true. This is annoying. | | comments: 10 comments or Leave a comment |
| I've got a lot of friends in the MD/VA/DC area (including two sets of parents/stepparents, friends, ex's, etc). It would be nice to visit them. I'm also looking at my pay stub, and seeing the accrued vacation time creeping up towards 60hr, and very much bearing in mind the limitations on how much I can carry over into next year.
So a vacation to MD/VA/DC area sounds attractive.
Scheduling and savings issues suggest that the week of August 22nd through 30th would be good -- and that now would be a good time to start planning.
So...
Who wants to see me in MD/VA/DC? | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| I've barely been up an hour or so; my eyes are still fuzzy from sleep. I'm reading blogs.
I found a blog that was recommended via another blog I recently found. The text is hard to read, it looks thin and blurry, as if my monitor is having problems with the edge (it shouldn't, it's an LCD monitor, so it shouldn't have the focusing problems of a CRT). Increasing the font size doesn't make the situation much better.
Obviously, it's a bad font choice; some fonts work well on monitors, others don't. I can use Firebug to find out the font and perhaps override it with my preference.
What did I find? "color: #555555;". The blogger chose to post in a 66% gray on a white background, explicitly overriding the implicit black text.
Thinking this was, perhaps, a Wordpress thing, I checked out a few Wordpress blogs, and it appears that the color preferred by Wordpress is #666666, which is even worse. I did find some #222222, and a few #333333, but only a couple #000000.
Worse, I discovered that my math blog, by default, used #29303b, a dark blue-grey. It's fixed now to black.
Why would someone choose to do that? Why would someone intentionally lower the contrast and make it harder to read? | | comments: Leave a comment |
| A recent "Penn Says" is about the statement by a Cardinal in the Catholic Church that Atheists are not fully human. Penn is decent enough to give more context, in that the Cardinal was saying that the transcendent experience was part of the human experience and that Atheists, cutting themselves off from that experience, don't fully participate in the human experience.
Penn's reaction: "Fuck you".
I'm fully aware that that's not a cogent, rational argument, but I'm uncertain exactly which rhetorical fallacy it is. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| My mom watches Alton Brown, and while she doesn't always like his recipes, she respects his knowledge and is willing to give things a try. One of those things recently was balsamic vinegar on ice cream. Tonight at dinner, sheherazahde and I tried it on a store-brand premium vanilla (I gave a taste to skitten as well).
Out of the three of us, I was the only one who liked it. It was an interesting combination of flavors which I think worked well. I put much more vinegar on the ice cream than Zahde, but she didn't find it improved by sampling a section of her bowl richer in vinegar.
Supposedly, Alton mentioned that while we don't tend to think of sweet and sour as flavors that work together, the Chinese have long had "sweet and sour sauce", which shows they can. I think he's missing a much closer example: Lemonade is almost pure sweet and sour, as are sweetarts. Along the lemonade vain, there is the medieval middle-eastern drink sekanjabin, which is essentially a syrup made with sugar, vinegar, and mint, served with ice water. Sekanjabin has the sweet/tart taste of lemonade, but without tasting lemony. Instead, it tastes of mint and of the origin of the vinegar (imagine that). So I don't think sweet/sour are bad in combination. | | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment |
| I'm hot, I've no real strong plans tonight, and I'm down on my sleep. I think I'm going to call it a very early night and go to bed now, 5 hours before I normally would.
I'll read some Dirty Pair on my way to sleep. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Today I got notice that someone subscribed to my dreamwidth journal and granted me access to their journal (i.e., what would be, on LJ, friending me). After figuring out how to reset my password, I reciprocated and checked my "reading page" (aka, my friends page).
Only one person was on it. It appears that since I got my account on 2 May, I haven't subscribed to anyone, nor anyone to me, until today.
It also occurred to me that having a Dreamwidth account so I could follow my peeps who shifted over there but not actually following anyone is silly. Further occurrances included the idea that I've forgotten who did shift over there, and I don't know how to search, especially since people sometimes change their name.
So...
I have a dreamwidth account, using the name blaisepascal. Let me know, either here or there, if you are on dreamwidth. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| CSS stands for "Cascading Style Sheets", and are a technique for applying "styling" (i.e., how things look) to web pages.
I want to find resources for best practices in writing CSS files -- essentially, a formatting style guide for CSS files.
Obviously, "CSS style" doesn't work for finding what I want on Google.
Any suggestions? | | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment |
| skitten, sheherazahde and I went to see Star Trek1 on Saturday.
My thoughts... For good or bad, it's Star Trek (and by "bad", I mean the military protocol is for shite, they have a tube full of water labeled "inert reactant" (water is rarely either, and reactants are by definition not inert), etc). It definitely felt like a pilot for a future series, which may be good or bad.
The good side is that the effects are superb, the writing was good, except for the distinctly Trek-like issues I mentioned above, and the actors all handle the roles well.
The bad side is two-fold: first, some folks will be disappointed by the deliberate breaking-with-continuity this movie introduces. The movie makes no bones about it: it sets up an alternate timeline so that future series/movies which use this as a basis don't have to follow "known" canon. That is, to my mind, a somewhat minor point. The more major point is that the new actors will forever be in the shadow of the original actors. Not all the actors have this problem. Chris Pine did a good job of keeping Kirk Kirk, while at the same time not being Shatner. Likewise, Zoe Saldaña made Uhura her own, but I found Anton Yelchin and Karl Urban's performances to be too derivative of Walter Koenig and DeForest Kelly's takes on the characters. Urban specifically sounded in parts like he was channelling Kelly. Many of the actors admit to taking deliberate inspiration from their predecessor, but I feel that's a mistake. I don't want to see Urban playing Kelly playing Bones, I want to see Urban playing Bones. If, instead of Kirk/Spock/Bones/Uhura/Sulu/Chekov, they had picked another crew to follow, the actors would have been able to better make them their own.
Another gripe with the film is the comedy. To the best of my recollection, most previous incarnations of Star Trek were not played for the jokes. While there may have been humor, everything was played as a drama. The major exceptions being ST:TVH ("Everyone remember where we parked", "He did too much LDS in the 60's", "A keyboard, how quaint", etc) and perhaps later movies. In this movie, there were whole scenes which existed for comedic intent (the running series of complications from a simple medical procedure, for instance), or running gags which popped up periodically in the film for no reason other than a laugh. Chekov's accent was bad enough without deliberate gags centered around it.
There were, however, subtle jokes which might go past without notice. An away mission features Kirk, Sulu, and a barely-named third crewman. I didn't miss that the third crewman's armor was red, but it went by fast (and so did he). Other reviewers pointed out the intriguing parallel in one scene to a similar sequence in ST:TVH involving an ontological paradox.
Overall, I felt it was a good movie, and worth watching. I wish to was done a little more "straight", and I fear that the actors won't be able to live up to their predecessors if they keep trying to be "inspired" by them.
1Does anyone know what the proper HTML semantic markup for the title of a work is? The standard form I was taught for English writing is that titles of "long works" (movies, books, TV series, magazines) should be italicized (or underlined, if you can't italicize, as underlining tells the typesetter to set in italic type). While HTML does have the "i" tag, it's considered visual markup, not semantic. The choices I know of (em, strong, cite, sub, sup, | | comments: 13 comments or Leave a comment |
| Dreamwidth (which I don't really use, but registered with in time to get an account there) has seen fit to give me two invite codes.
Anyone want one? | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| It's probably worth mentioning that I've started using a new blog, called Triangular Tunings, on Blogger. I'm not going away from LJ (as if you could tell, given the frequency of my postings), but rather I'm using the new blog as an outlet for my mathematical blathering. Getting into the nitty-gritty of what a number is (for instance) is probably not in most of my LJ readers interest, so it goes there. An add-in to blogger also allows me to use LaTeX for math typesetting, which I can't do here.
I've already posted two posts, the first called "Testing" and is basically a LaTeX-check post. The second, called What am I doing here? talks about my math background and what I'd like to do with that blog.
If it sounds interesting to you, check it out, and tell others. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Today Skitten and I are supposed to be heading to Boston today for NEFFA. So far...
1) I got to bed really late last night (2:30ish), Skitten at midnight. She got up at 5am to write an email was nagging at her. The alarm-clock woke me up at 6:30, so both Skitten and I have about 4-5 hours sleep.
2) I'm doing laundry this morning so I'll have clothing for the trip. In moving stuff from the washer to the dryer, I pulled my collection of cards (drivers license, health insurance cards, customer loyalty cards) out of the washer. Notably not among them is my Visa Debit card.
3) Skitten left for her thrice-weekly life skills program at her normal time, around 8:45. I got a call at 9:20 from the life skills people asking if she was planning on coming today, since she wasn't there there yet.
4) Skitten doesn't carry either of her cell-phones, so I can't call her to find out if she's OK. This also means she can't call me if she isn't, either.
Now while the laundry is drying, I need to walk to the bank and make a withdrawal of cash for this weekend.
ETA:Skitten's program was at a different location today, and she had bad directions. After looking for nearly an hour, she gave up and headed home. We passed each other going in opposite directions (me on foot, she in car) while I was going to the bank, and she met me there. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| For those who can read skitten's recent journal entry entitled "geeks and their toys", think "reverse psychology" as far as I'm concerned.
Or... Those small remote-controlled helicopters are neat, even if hard to control. I had fun when I tried one the other day, and getting one for my b-day (on May 3rd) would be dandy with me. | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
| So it appears that this weekend Amazon.com had a mishap which got a bunch of people upset, the Twitterverse and blogosphere exploded, and in general a lot of people got kerflumped and Amazon got accused of a bunch of nastiness.
Amazon, now that they've had a chance to look into it, have called it a "glitch", and their response "ham-fisted and embarrassing", and are working on fixing the problem.
Of course, that's not good enough for many members of the Twitterverse and blogosphere, who continue to see it as a sign of Amazon's malice, and not so much a glitch as Amazon getting caught, and don't view Amazon's response as an apology.
(One of my LJ friends did, in fact, describe the letter he got from Amazon as "Amazon grovels" and an "abject apology". This person is, however, both (a) sensible, and (b) in the minority. I leave it to the reader to decide if (a) implies (b).)
The comments I've seen which don't accept the explanation boil down to a few points:
1) The CSR said this was because of an "adult" policy, and now they are saying it's a glitch. Amazon must be trying a cover-up.
2) Things have been disappearing since February, so this isn't a glitch. Amazon must be trying a cover-up.
...and a few others.
The common thread is that there is one, or two pieces of evidence which they don't see explicitly explained by Amazon's explanation (which is terse, preliminary, and sketchy), and assume therefore that the explanation as a whole must be faulty.
What I feel they fail to realise is that full post-mortems of accidents, "glitches", and the like usually tend to show that there isn't a single cause or single point of failure, but that several things go wrong at the same time to cause the disaster. A poorly thought out policy which, alone would be relatively harmless, combines with a lapse of judgement (also harmless on it's own), plus a usually harmless technical glitch, and poof, a disaster occurs.
Here's a few of the "several things that went wrong" I see in the Amazon situation:
1. Conflating of search and ranking: Amazon's codebase apparently links the ability to search for a title and the ranking of a title such that if a title has no ranking, it is difficult to search for, and vice versa. This might have made sense at the time -- perhaps a programmer used the general search algorithms in finding books to rank, or searching is done in rank-order, so highly ranked books would be found quicker (but unranked books wouldn't be found at all), or whatever. Why doesn't matter, but what matters is that it happened. Perhaps when it was done it wasn't done with the thought that Amazon may, someday, want to remove the rankings from select titles, or make certain books hard to find.
One commenter mentioned as evidence for disbelief of the official story that "if it was searching only, or ranking only, I might have believed, but not both". Of course, if (as evidence seems to indicate) searching and ranking are linked in general then this is absolutely backwards. If it were searching only, or ranking only, then that would indicate that the linkage was broken for this glitch.
2. The decision to hide "adult" titles. Given that Amazon's title list, plus wide assortment of other things they sell, includes many things of an explicitly sexual nature (a search for "dildo" in the "Health and Personal Care" department showed me a page with "1-24 of 14948 results", including some results which make me go "wtf?" ("Realistic White Boy Vibrating Dildo with Free Gift Presidential Soothing Shaving Balm Set"... Presidential?)). I can see Amazon wanting such things to not just appear to unsuspecting people. If Bob's boss appeared at his cubicle asking him to order "that book you suggested yesterday", Bob might not want "Teenage Vixens in Bondage, volume 3" to appear in his "Recommended" section when pulling up Amazon's homepage. And I can see Amazon thinking it a good idea to make it not.
Of course, the seemingly sensible idea of making it hard to find explicitly sexual material has side effects, which some might not like. While Bob might not want Teenage Vixens in Bondage to appear accidentally, he may very well want to know that it's available, when he's looking for it. If keeping it off the front page makes it unsearchable in general, then Bob may never find the porn he's looking for, and the author may never get the sale he/she wants.
The implementation of this is unknown. One suspicion is that it's automatic, based on tags and flagging by users; or based on user complaints, etc. Folks have noticed inconsistencies, such as some Penthouse books escaped flagging while other, less explicit works were flagged. To me, this suggests a somewhat haphazard, case-by-case approach rather than a blanket approach. Of course, hiring keyboard jocks to browse through the entire catalog searching for smut is expensive, so a case-by-case approach is somewhat justified.
3. The cultural conflation of the terms "adult" and "sexual" material, especially combined with the near term "sexuality". The books inadvertently deranked in this case were mostly books dealing with issues of sexuality, hence hitting the GLTBQ community especially hard (as virtually all books which deal with GLTBQ issues are going to be tagged with "sexuality", even if there is nothing overtly about sexuality in it).
It has been suggested by a few people that the issue here was one of mislabeling; either someone marking the books "adult" (meaning to them, "not aimed at children") or "sexual" (instead of "sexuality"), or even "adult" instead of "sexuality", and thus inadvertently triggering the filter in 2. This is very possible.
4. Poor communication. In implementing the "adult" filter, Amazon didn't make it well-known what they were doing, as such people just randomly noticed seemingly arbitrary books deranked and complained. At which point, Amazon crafted a statement of policy and stuck it in the 3-ring-binder for its call-center so when people complained, they got the policy statement.
5. Related, call-center cluelessness. Call comes in, person complaining that book they are looking for isn't ranked/searchable, 3-ring-binder says amazon has a policy statement concerning "adult", sexually-explicit books not being searchable by accident, read statement, end call, log it, 3 minutes, ahead of schedule, answer next call... Never mind that the book not findable is "Heather has Two Mommies." a children's book which is not sexually-explicit at all. Never mind that the problem isn't exactly the same as the scenario in the script. The call was completed in good time.
Of course, this claim by a CSR drone that "Heather has Two Mommies" was excluded because of the policy about adult titles is taken by some as official policy of Amazon that they consider that kids book to be sexually explicit, which can only be because it's GLTBQ, so Amazon must be intentionally flagging GLTBQ books as sexually explicit, even when the books clearly aren't.
6. Timing: This all went down on a weekend which includes both Passover and Easter. The Twitterverse and Blogosphere went kablooey, and nobody was in to fix it until Monday morning. Surprising? Not really. But the timing was bad. If this had happened on, say, Wednesday, it'd probably be fixed later that day and not as large an uproar would have happened.
Lot's of room for errors in any of these areas of concern. Lots of decisions which could, and probably did, get made without full consideration of side-effects. Lots of bad luck. And now 57,000 books which have to be re-listed because something -- several things -- went wrong.
Hanlon's Razor states "Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity". Based on what happened, and what we know, I'm far from declaring Amazon malicious in this. | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
| For the past couple of days we've been getting air in our pipes, making the water sputter and spit. There's also been a backhoe and a group of City employees tearing up the intersection down the block, complete with a pump that's pumping water out of the hole.
This morning, the air stopped coming out of the pipes, in a slow hissing which trickled down to nothing. There's also no water coming out of the pipes, either.
I'm assuming that since the crew is still digging up the road on the Saturday morning before Easter, they are responsible for the outage and are trying to fix it.
We have a sing at our house tonight. If we are still without water by then, it'll be interesting. "Attention all, we have no water due to the work being done on the water system down the block... Don't flush!" | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Timeline:
Sunday, while at work, ordered lunch for 3 of us using Campusfood.com, putting the $53.60 charge on my Debit card. While the charge immediately effects my available balance, it doesn't effect my ledger/posted balance until the charge is actually posted, usually a few days later.
Monday, after work, received a letter from my Credit Union informing me that they had, as a courtesy to me, had placed "Overdraft Protection" on my account, meaning that if I were to overdraft my account by up to $300, they would pay the draft to protect me from embarrassment. They would still charge me a $25 overdraft fee.
Tuesday, at 5:00pm, had a $53.60 charge posted to my account from Campusfood.com. This lineitem went unnoticed.
Tuesday, at 5:09pm, had a $53.60 charge posted to my account from Campusfood.com. This lineitem went unnoticed.
Tuesday, late night: Purchased $20 or so in groceries from Wegmans, via card.
Wednesday, lunchtime: Noticed that my available balance was $0.00, went to talk to Credit Union about overdraft protection. Pointed out that without overdraft protection a paycheck that misses direct deposit would cause their automated bill paying system to refuse to conduct a large number of transactions until Monday, but with the overdraft protection the same missed direct deposit would result in probably over $100 of overdraft charges. I'm not that embarrassed by causing the auto bill pay system to delay a business day. I asked to opt out of the overdraft protection, and she took my name, account info, and wrote a note for the person involved.
Wednesday night: received an email from Campusfood.com, saying that their credit card processor had accidentally double-billed a lot of people, and they were working on the problem. It should be resolved in 24-48 hours.
Wednesday night: Sent email to my credit union informing them of my low balance caused by the double-billing, cited the times of the double-billing, and included a copy of the email form Campusfood. Requested that I not be hit with any overdraft fees caused by double-billing.
Thursday morning: $20 from groceries posted, pushing my ledger balance below $0.00.
Thursday morning: $25 overdraft fee posted, pushing my ledger balance even lower.
Thursday afternoon: $53.60 credit to my account from Campusfood.com posted, bringing my ledger balance to $23.
Thursday evening: Received email from credit union, informing me that they see the double-posting, but that the NSF charge has already been levied. Suggests I contact Campusfood.com to get the fee from them. Provides me with PDF of "Whom it may concern" letter stating that I got an NSF charge of $25 because of the double-posting.
Now what should I do? Do you think I'll have a shot at getting $25 from Campusfood.com because of their mistake? Is it worth my time to try? | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
| A lot of hullabaloo is being made right now about AIG, and what they are doing with the bailout monies. It seems that they are paying executives $160,000,000 in "bonuses", and have given $160,000,000,000+ to Suisse Credit, Deutche Bank, and other banks in Europe and the States -- which, some have pointed out, is going to pay for "bonuses" and large salaries of the financiers of those banks. People are upset that AIG is taking our money, our taxpayer money, and giving it away to the already insanely rich. And the common man really doesn't like the fact that the insanely rich are, in fact, insanely rich and don't like what they view as their money going to the insanely rich -- folks who they feel put the country in the crisis it's in now.
There's another way to look at what AIG is doing with the money the Treasury gave it...
A "bank failure" is really about one key thing: the inability for the bank to honor the contracts it has entered into. All a bank has is trust, earned by making and keeping contracts. If a bank fails to keep that trust, it quickly has nothing, and gets shut down by regulators. But if it can make its obligations, both contractual and regulatory, it can keep going no matter how poor it is.
AIG isn't your normal bank, and isn't a normal sized bank, either. Technically, AIG is an insurance company, insuring other companies against loan default risk. Effectively, they co-signed loans for a fee.
Most large-scale loans have conditions attached: If you have an x credit rating, you get one interest rate and or have to post a certain amount of collateral, if you have a lower, y credit rating, you get another, higher interest rate and have to post a higher amount of collateral. If you have a y credit rating, but can get a cosigner who has an x credit rating, you can get the lower rate and the lower collateral, but if you lose the cosigner, you have to make up the difference. The conditions, triggers, rates, collateral, and timing are understood by those who buy and sell the loans. But things can get hairy if you have a loan and somehow lose you cosigner. The "counterparty" -- the guy who's getting your money -- has a legal right, by contract, to say "put up more collateral by the deadline or go bankrupt". If you don't have the collateral, or can't get it (by, say, taking out a loan), or can't get an equally good cosigner, you're screwed.
AIG cosigned a bunch of loans; it was one of their business models. That means that a lot, a lot, of people were using AIG to keep their collateral obligations and interest rates down. If AIG were to fail, a lot, a lot, of people would have to come up with collateral very quickly, and most would fail. That means a lot, a lot, of bankruptcies all at once, all over the world. That would be bad, very bad.
AIG was on the verge of not being able to honor its contracts. If it was unable to honor its contracts, the really bad things described above would happen. So the US Government stepped in.
The US Government gave AIG money for one purpose, and one purpose only: Honor thy contracts, and by doing so, let the world financial system survive long enough to disentangle itself from you.
What did AIG do with this money?
It gave over $160B to various banks, both overseas and domestic, with which it had contracts which required it to do so.
It gave 1 permille of that value to a total of 400 executives which, in 2007, it had signed contracts which required them to issue incentive-based pay for 2008 at 2007 levels regardless of actual performance. It did many other things, all of which paid off people whom AIG had a contractual obligation to pay.
AIG did exactly what we gave them the money for: they honored their contracts. If they had failed to do so, then bad things would have happened. If the Government steps in and abrogates some of their contracts because "we" don't like the terms, even if the contracts truly suck, then the end result is that AIG then has a reputation for not honoring their contracts, so their cosignature is worthless, collateralization requirements kick in, margin calls happen, everybody goes bankrupt.
Honor thy contracts, or bad shit will happen.
Pissed that AIG executives are getting bonuses? Suck it up and deal. Let AIG use the money to do what we told them to do: Honor their contracts, and pay the shitty bonuses. Honor their contracts, and pay off the bad loans they never should have cosigned. | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
| To deal with the so-called "toxic assets"...
1. Stop-loss mortgage failure risk by having HUD place a standing bid on all forclosure auctions of 70% of outstanding principal for properties which meet guidelines (primary residence, loan made before 1/1/2009, bundled in a MBS, etc). The idea isn't to stop foreclosures, but rather to limit the losses associated with them, and thus return market value to the "toxic assets".
2. Properties purchased by HUD as part of 1. are immediately relisted on the market at HUD's purchase price, and remain on the market until they sell at that price.
3. Unsold properties are managed by HUD as rental properties in support of existing HUD housing programs.
The idea isn't to prevent foreclosure (which can be managed by a separate program if necessary), nor is it to bail out banks by giving them money, but rather to detoxify their assets so they have value again.
The government wouldn't be buying complex financial instruments of unknown value, but rather would be buying real property and holding it until its value rises again.
Why won't it work? | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| My new computer is built and runs fine, modulo a couple of issues. But my old computer, which I was planning on wiping clean and giving to skitten, has decided this is an opportune moment to refuse to power up. It looks like I'm going to have to transplant its hard drive to the new machine to get my data off. So it goes.
As I found out shortly before I ordered the thing, the motherboard only has 1 PS/2 port, meaning I can plug in either my existing keyboard (a Dell QuietKey from back when computers were still beige) or my existing mouse (a Logitech Trackman Marble Fx which is the best trackball I've ever found), but not both. I have a spare USB mouse floating around, but it's one of the worst-designed Apple mice I've run across. The cord is probably 24" long, and the body is perfectly round. This means you can't tell when it's straight in your hand, and you can't move it from, say, your computer to your desk. The end result is that the keyboard/mouse system is technically usable right now, but I'm going to have to get a new keyboard before the end of the day.
The other issue is the networking. I got a wireless card for it, but it needed a driver update to work with wireless and even so I'm finding wireless transfer speeds to be slow. Two configuration changes switched it from completely unbearable to merely annoying: I switched form channel 6 (the default everyone is on) to channel 1 (which is far enough from channel 6 to not be interfered with), and I changed my ESSID from the factory default to "diacritic". Since there appears to still be a WAP with the default ESSID on channel 6, the name and channel change probably makes a lot of people happy.
Other than that, it's fast, it's quiet, and it's here. There's still some setup work that needs to be done, but it's here! | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
| The computer is being shipped in two boxes (I'm assuming the case in one, everything else in the other). Both boxes are "out for delivery", one from Ithaca, one from Cortland. Why one box was unloaded in Cortland, I don't know. I expect to get the Ithaca box today, and hope to get the Cortland box as well, but I'll see what happens.
Update: The "We've shipped" email finally arrived, complete with a breakdown of what is in which box. The case is out for delivery from Ithaca, the rest is out for delivery from Cortland. | | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment |
| I ordered a new computer last night from Newegg -- some assembly required.
To answer a query from when I mentioned getting a computer last time, the only times I've bought an ix86-based computer premade were either 2nd hand or made in a shop where I could watch and help (my first XT clone). Every other machine I've built and/or upgraded from parts. I once had a used 386sx machine that I had upgraded so often I came to realize that the only part that remained from the original machine was a floppy-drive ribbon cable! So I've no problem assembling a machine.
All the parts I bought are new, but they aren't top-of-the-line bleeding-edge parts. I try to get good technology that's been able to have the price fall substantially, but isn't obsolete yet.
Here's what I went with:
( geeky details behind cut )
What I need help on is a name. The current naming scheme is diacriticals. The first machine in the series was umlaut, followed by the two laptops cedilla and macron, and my current box is hacek. Does anyone have any interesting diacriticals to suggest?
Update: The suggestions so far are:
- jcgbigler with diëresis, a pair of dots written over a vowel to indicate that the vowel should be pronounced separately and not as part of a diphthong.
- cawfetalk with circumflex, a bend line pointing upwards over a vowel to indicate a rather wide variety of things, including a missing, but silent "ugh" set of letters (as in brôt instead of brought
- acelightning with tilde, a squiggle placed above the letter n in Spanish words indicating that the n should be pronounced more like "ny" instead of "n".
- acelightning with breve, a cup-like symbol placed over vowels to indicate a short vowel. In modern-day orthography of classical latin, macron and breve are opposites, one indicates a metrically long vowel, the other a metrically short vowel.
Thanks for all your suggestions.
Any others? | | comments: 10 comments or Leave a comment |
| Good news: the bonus I'd been expecting since August finally came in! I'm using it for some necessary computer upgrades. The current plan is for Skitten and I to get new LCD monitors, for me to get a kit computer (aka, all the components in a box that I have to put together), and for her to get the computer I'm currently using.
Not so good news: I got an email on Wednesday from HR (sent to entire company) saying that due to unforseeable/unavoidable issues, payroll would not be direct deposited on Friday (i.e. today/yesterday), and that physical checks would be distributed Monday. I got another email a short while later saying Friday, checks would be distributed on Friday, sorry for any panic attacks. When depositing my much larger-than-normal check, I was told that there is an automatic hold on check deposits above a certain amount. The upshot is that about 60% of my check was immediately available, and 40% will be available on Tuesday.
The end result is that with the automatic bill payments going out, I didn't have the money in the account to get two LCD monitors and order the kit computer. I could get just one monitor, and will have to wait until Tuesday to deal with the rest.
However, the new 22" widescreen monitor on my desk is spiffy. It's large enough that Firefox spread across it is hard to read, so I actually have "Wallpaper" visible on my screen. The colors are sharp, the brightness and contrast exceed that of my 12yr old CRT, the resolution is higher, etc. Instead of muddied and fuzzy, things are popping.
I'm happy.
BTW, if anyone knows of a good place online to get kit computers, let me know. Currently, I've found what I want at CompUSA/Tiger Direct (effectively the same site; I looked at them in adjacent tabs as if it were a blink-comparetor), but I'm willing to look elsewhere. I've got until at least Tuesday to make my selection. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| Good news...
I looked out the office window this morning and saw a Kestrel sitting on the picnic table outside my window not 3m away. Shortly thereafter it flew into a nearby tree branch, still within 15m or so. It stayed there for hours.
Bad news...
When I went out at half-past-oneish to take a photo, I only got one poor shot before my creeping up on it scared it away. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| I've been solving Rubik's Cubes for over a quarter century now. It's something I do in my idle time. It wasn't unusual to see cubes around the house in places I frequent, ready to pick up and fiddle with (that has stopped mostly because skitten stopped complaining about it and started throwing cubes away, a behavior I don't think she'd like if I did that with her stuff). My college roommate, knowing I tended to not like to let a scrambled cube stay scrambled, would often take my cubes and scramble them when I wasn't around, just to see how long it would take me to notice and solve. I own or have owned several Rubik's Revenge cubes (4x4x4 instead of the 3x3x3 of a standard Rubik's cube) and a Professor Cube (5x5x5). I can solve them all.
There's a common misconception about the Rubik's Cube which can work to my advantage. The misconception is that it requires great smarts or intelligence to solve the cube. As such, demonstrating that you can solve it to someone who can't works well as a surrogate to demonstrating real brains. The truth is... It really isn't that difficult. The methods people use for solving the cube mostly rely on memorized sequences of moves ("patterns") which accomplish a known subtask in the overall method. You typically work in stages, solving the cube bit by bit, and what patterns you use vary by stage. The main method I use has 6 stages and there is about 8 patterns I use to solve it. I'm not counting how I do the first stage which probably has patterns but I don't think of them that way. Other methods have different stages and patterns. Once you sit down and learn a method, committed to muscle-memory, solving the cube is easy. It just looks impressive.
What's hard, what does take smarts, is figuring out from scratch a method, figuring out which series of stages to use, and what patterns will take you from one stage to another. But that work doesn't show when you pick up a cube and solve it in front of someone. And most people who try and fail to solve a cube never consider that it needs to be done in stages, and that one needs to find patterns that advance what you are doing without destroying work already done. As for me, well, I learned my first method out of a book.
It's a lot easier to figure out patterns once you already know how to solve a cube. Before you know a method, every attempt of working with the cube is fraught with fear of messing it up, of losing what progress you have made. If you make a mistake, you won't be able to get it back. But once you know how to solve a cube reliably, you feel free to experiment, to see what happens when you do this or that. If it doesn't work, you can always recover by your old method. I'm fairly confident that the first method used many cubists involved a screwdriver. It eliminates the fear, but overall it's cheating in my opinion. Once a cubist can solve it without the screwdriver, few go back to it. The screwdriver method helped me figure out the Rubik's Revenge, but a large part of it was utilizing what I knew about the regular cube.
( Solving the cube, with pictures, under the cut ) | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
| We just got home from Bound For Glory, and as we are headed from car to door we hear police sirens. It happens occasionally, especially as we live about 3 blocks from the police station, 3 doors from a commercial ambulance company, and 300 feet from a fire station. So we don't think much of the sirens.
Then a car comes down the street, fast, noisy, and throwing off smoke. Wow, he's going somewhere. Then, just a few seconds later, the cop car, lights flashing, the loud siren going, tears past us going fast as well. I see the cop take a right onto the 1-way street at the end of the block.
Then the smoke from the first car hits us. Skitten says he's burning rubber; it smells horrible, choking, very sulfurous.. There was no skidding involved, so I suspect he had blown a tire and was burning up the remnants of the tire by still driving on it. That would also explain the noise.
The cop is now a block away, turning back onto our street, coming towards us. I see stinky-car still in the lead, heading for the intersection at the end of the block. He turns right onto the 1-way street, this time going the wrong way. Of course, the cop car follows him.
That's the last I saw of those two cars. We hung out a bit longer, I trying to judge where they were by the sirens (complicated by seeing two other cop cars with sirens running heading down the street in their general direction), and skitten trying to get me inside before the stinky-car heads back down this block and jumps the sidewalk at us.
Now I'm curious... what's the story? I'm sure that the charges drawn up will include resisting arrest, speeding, reckless driving, going the wrong way down a one-way street, and.... whatever he was fleeing from. | | comments: 7 comments or Leave a comment |
| As part of my recent physical, I asked the doctor to run blood tests for STDs[1] as well, just to be sure.
( if you don't want to know, don't be so clicky )
[1] An STD is a disease caused by an infectious agent so weak that only intimate contact will spread it. We don't call the common cold or influenza an STD even though they can be sexually transmitted. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| There is apparently a desire to make state-sanctioned executions in the US painless and humane. As such, various previous methods of execution have fallen out of favor because they are either slow and painful, or can be slow and painful when botched. The gas chamber, electrocution, hanging, all have that problem. Lethal injection was supposed to solve those problems, but evidence is showing that the States tend to botch the protocol, and that it is very possible that the prisoner ends up paralyzed and in serious pain before death. So some states are suspending execution by lethal injection while this is all worked out. The developer of the protocol has disavowed it, and vets say they wouldn't use that protocol to euthanize animals.
A State Senator in NH is proposing to bring back firing squads, as research seems to indicate that it is essentially quicker and less painful than lethal injection, especially lethal injection done wrong. It takes on average 2 minutes to die from firing squad, 9 to die from lethal injection.
If quick and painless is the goal, what's wrong with Madame Guillotine? | | comments: 10 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Had fun, got to see collwen for an extended period of time; got to see marnen for not as extended as we'd like (he had to work the Flurry), got to dine with zimarra, got to meet two friends of the above three whom I don't know if have LJ's, and ran into kdsorceress. Made it home safely just before midnight. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Joss Whedon's Dollhouse is supposed to start tonight. I'm interested.
The trouble is... I don't get Fox TV. I don't have cable, and there is no reception in my town. I'm also going to be out of town this weekend. I know Fox appears to be streaming it, but when I tried to watch the making of stuff streamed I was getting something like 5fps.
What I'd really like is some way, preferably legal, to download it and watch it from my HD.
Does anyone have any suggestions?
(BTW, I suck at finding stuff on via BitTorrent; I don't even know where to look). | | comments: 13 comments or Leave a comment |
| While I lost access to my AIM account at work a couple of weeks ago, (thus leading to the creation of a new AIM account), I never lost it from home.
Now it's working at work again. Go figure.
If you want me on AIM, my AIM name is my real first name, my first middle initial M, and my real last name. My real name is available in my profile. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Subject: | Ads.. | | Time: | 01:02 am |
|
| So, um...
I don't have cable, I was busy during the game, and I don't care that much about football (exactly how many Cardinals are native to Arizona, anyway?).
Anyone know where I can find the ads online? | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| I've got to print out a bunch of docs I've been working on in Visio. Visio is being very slow in how it's handling the printer.
As in...
1) Click "print".
2) Read Google Reader, Email, LJ, etc, until...
3) ...the print dialog box comes up. Click "properties"
4) read Google Reader, Email, LJ, etc, until...
5) ...the print properties dialog box comes up.
6) Select tabloid paper from the 2nd tab of the dialog, and click OK
7) Type more of this entry while waiting for...
8) ...the print dialog to get focus again. Click "current page", then OK.
9) Finish this entry.
10) Go get printout, and repeat.
It's taken at least 15 minutes to print the page. I'm not ready to go to step 10 yet. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| My password no longer seems to work on my long-held AIM screenname.
My new AIM screenname is BlaiseTriangle.
Of course, I've lost my buddy-list in the process. If you want to be on my buddy list, AIM me, or reply to this posting.
Any ideas on how to get my old name back? | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| This morning skitten went to start the car, and it failed to do anything. I wasn't there, so I don't know exactly what the symptoms were, but she was unable to go anywhere today.
This evening (minutes ago, in fact), I tried it. I got no click, no lights, nothing. My VOM shewed 2.88V across the battery terminals, rather than the expected 12V.
Does this seem like something that can be fixed with a jump, or is a new battery necessary?
ETA: I've pulled the battery, and the resistance through the car from POS to NEG is about 67Ω. At 12V, that would work out to about 180mA. I figure that could be the clock in the radio.
The battery is now in our front hallway, warming up. I doubt it'll help, but I can take it with me to the parts store tomorrow without a problem. | | comments: 15 comments or Leave a comment |
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