In doing my part to protect America from the skurge of dangerous haircare products—like Aquanet—I have labeled all my little 2 ounce bottles and placed them in a wee little pint bag:
For the nerdy among you, yes those are Nalgene bottles.
Joss Whedon is at it again with Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Just brilliant.
What the heck happened this morning? I get into my rental car, and flip between three satellite stations and each is playing “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley. My car has been Rickrolled.
The art of procrastination, as expressed in a flow chart. Simple to follow!
Share and enjoy.
On a project I’m working on, we have a contract administrative person. This person, who is nice enough, has an odd tendency to share every bit of minutia with everyone. It’s like having a verbal Twitter stream.
It speaks volumes about my personality when reviewing a document that the first thing I think of is: where the hell are the ligatures? The second thing is: why, oh why, must they use Arial?
As people who know me will gleefully admit, I can be a pedant about certain things. Therefore I took great pleasure in this entry in the Q&A section of the Chicago Manual of Style website:
Q. Is it proper to define an acronym within an acronym or an abbreviation within an abbreviation? I am working on a document that contains an abbreviation that is really two other abbreviations smushed together with additional words tacked onto either side. And to top it all off, the overall abbreviation doesn’t even contain the first letter of every word in the other two abbreviations. They’ve dropped letters to make it shorter. Finally, if it is acceptable to do this sort of thing, how would I define the abbreviation or acronym on first use within the document if the two incorporated abbreviations were not previously defined in the document? Whew!
The answer was apropos:
A. Who wrote this document—Dr. Seuss? Yes, you may explain this funny animal parenthetically regardless of the lack of previous explanation. And maybe you should hire a cartoonist to illustrate.
Often I work in fields where not only are there entirely too many acronyms, but often the same TLA has multiple meanings depending on the context. This makes for all sorts of fun. All I can say is I’m happy for the acronym package for LaTeX
If there is a downside to living in a 1960s high-rise, it is this: centrally provided heating and cooling. Now, don’t mistake this for someone else setting the temperature, but unfortunately someone else does decide when you flip from one to the other. I’m sure historically this hasn’t been a problem, but this year, it got warm early, and there’s nothing as tiring as coming home from a long trip to a home that’s 85F. The only solution is to open the windows. While this is only going to go on for a few more days (May 1st the building switches to chilled water), I decided to take action.
So, I bought a lovely Hunter Century stand fan. Not the cheapest thing out there, but everyone I’d talked to thought it was by far the quietest and most attractive. So, off to Amazon, and 2 days later I receive the fan. I put it together, and turns out it’s DOA. I tried everything, even pulling out the volt-meter. Looks like there’s a break in the winding of the motor.
I call Hunter’s 800-number customer support line, and after about 2 minutes they agree to send me out a new one free of charge. I just received that this morning, put it together, and … beautiful quiet breeze. Great customer service saved dissatisfaction once again. Now just to find out how I’m supposed to ship the bad one back to them!
Something I’ve noticed over my life is that while generally “taste” goes up with money, especially the cost of something, there’s a certain precipitous point where it collapses into Donald Trump and Paris Hilton territory:
Freaking brilliant video from the people who brought you IM IN UR MANGER KILLING UR SAVIOR.
As much as I hate traveling, the following excerpt is why I dislike being in the office:
Dude, if KISS came back around, and they have that gold ticket? You know, the one where you an hang out with them after? I’d buy that for $500.
The stupid, it burns. Seriously, an 80,000 word comment, and not a coherent thought within.
As I sit here, waiting for my miniscule regional jet to arrive from somewhere “else”, I am forced to contemplate the risk/reward situation with airlines and passengers. Basically, airlines have pitiful few direct consequences when they are painfully late. If I were to show up 3 hours late, like my plane is, and thereby miss my flight, I would be expected to fork over at least $100, and if I hadn’t called ahead, they would have invalidated my ticket and I would have lost all of it—in this case $600+.
What happens when the airlines is late? They might, if they’re feeling particularly magnanimous, give me 2,500 frequent-flyer miles that have a real-world worth of something approaching approximately, $70, if I had to buy them. Not nothing, but when combined with the value of the time that I’ve wasted, not much. And that is totally within their discretion.
If we were to change the rules so that airlines had to pay for being late, and that figure escalated as time passed, then I think this might put the balance back in the system to encourage the airlines to better manage their resources, and the FAA, by proxy, to better manage the slots. If there were potentially tens of thousands of dollars on the line, I bet they’d manage their flights better. It might mean fewer flights, on bigger planes, less frequently, but that’s ok in my book.
Yesterday, I was supposed to fly back from Indianapolis to DC but after having my flight repeatedly delayed1 up to 5+ hours, I decided to just rebook on this morning’s o’dark-hundred flight, and sleep in a bed, rather than the airport. Let’s hope that today’s festivities run more smoothly than yesterdays.
1 It seems weather, congestion and a “work slowdown” conspired to make it really bad.
Do you really miss the 70s, do ya’? Reactions are varried:
Friend #1: That’s kinda cool.
Friend #2: my eyes! /claw/
Friend #3: Actually, things do happen when you wear Eleganza. One of those things is chafing. The other is low sperm count.
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Oddly, this does mean something to me:
She’s a level 4 pricing approver.
Is that something like wielding a +4 Axe of Currency?
Today, for a client, I had to drive up to Martinsburg, WV. For anyone who knows the federal space, you know that about 1/4 of the government has been relocated to Senator Byrd’s back yard. Anyway, it’s about 1:30 from my house, which means good tunes are necessary. In rotation today:
It’s a bit of a weird collection, but it worked shuffling through the iPod.
From an interview with Robert Deodaat Emile Oxenaar comes this lovely design for a 50 guilder note:
Why can’t we have such beautiful money? Don’t answer that, it’s just rhetorical.
I’m a huge fan of Stephen Colbert, and I’m also a huge fan of ice cream (it shows). What more could one ask for than Stephen Colbert’s Americone Dream ice cream from Ben & Jerry’s? Not much.
Freedom is great!
I will soon need to get to the truthiness of this tastiness.
It’s funny. For the past few years, I’ve not read a lot of “fluffy” books; instead, I’ve read a lot of heavy books on social and political issues. It’s making my brain hurt, and quite honestly, it’s depressing. So, when a friend recommended World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, I figured why not. I had previously read the same author’s book The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection From the Living Dead, which was amazingly fun.
I started reading the book on my flight down to Austin, and finished it on my flight to Chicago. It’s a blast, and quite fun. It’s also quite insightful in ways you simply don’t expect. Well recommended, and not the least bit about zombies at the end of the day, but instead about humanity. The interview format only manages to disarm the reader on the improbable topic.
Last night, I was reviewing my PDF copy of Agile Web Development with Rails (2nd edition), I decided I’d really prefer to have a paper copy, and thought for a moment about printing it myself. Then I looked at buying a book, and found a receipt for where I had actually already bought a paper. Unfortunately, I never received it, so I contacted their support people, and they are not only replacing it, but they offered a PDF copy to read in the mean time. That’s great service.
I’m currently staring at a government document that uses Arial that is bold, underline and italic for headers. At the same time. Ugh. Eyesore.
Don’t get me started about the double spaces after punctuation and the horrible misuse of quote marks and spaces for aligning things.
Of late, two albums have shifted back into rotation on my iPod. The first is the latest Dixie Chicks album, Taking the Long Way Home (iTunes). I’ve been listening to the Dixie Chicks, off and on, since the mid 1990s, and was first turned on by something Ray Benson mentioned at a concert once. This album, to me, represents the culmination of a lot of changes they’ve been going through.
No longer content to live inside the confines of country music—not that they ever fit very well—they have shrugged off the entire concept and remade themselves with a blending of a lot of things. You can’t call it country when you have Chad Smith playing drums. The album holds tight to their foundational sound and I think that there’s a lot of great tracks. While I love their political commentary, and admire them for speaking their mind, I think “Voice inside my head” is the best track.
The second album that’s re-entered rotation after a bit of a break is The Revolution Start … Now (iTunes) by Steve Earle, who has gone through quite the ride over his career. Never content to do what he’s told, he’s made an amazing album full of anger and the very core of protest. Love or hate it, it’s a great album and demonstrates that there is some rebellion left in the rock world. A “rich man’s war” indeed.
A toy Lite-Brite. It’s amazing what people are doing with the web now. Finally, the internets have arrived.
Wired reports that your non-dairy creamer may be explosive, which is interesting, except that I’ve known this for … almost 20 years. Not exactly breaking the news this year, are they? The way I found out was by accident, however, back when I was in high-school.
You see, I was in a program that thought it would be great to give a group of 5 high-school kids a video camera and have them shoot a scene from Shakespeare. The only trick? You had to modernize it, and bring it into the 20th century. So, we chose a scene from The Tempest, and brought it up to Vietnam. Strange, but it lets teenage boys play with guns and explosives.
As part of the effort, we wanted to do some pyrotechnics to simulate land-mines during the scene where we ran along a creek bed near one person’s home. So, being the creative, and slightly pyromaniacal kid that I was, I improvised. The top of a soda can was cut off, a model rocket igniter was placed in the bottom and non-dairy creamer placed on top. The effect was quite splendid, and in fact nearly singed a few people’s eyebrows when we were playing with them.
Can you imagine trying that kind of thing in today’s school? They’d lock you up as a terrorist.
When I read this great Dilbert strip, I really was reminded of what it’s like dealing with some large organizations. Oy.
The holiday was great, and I enjoyed the time with my family. Now, I’m just sitting here waiting for my flight back to DC, and actually sad to leave Austin this time. Who knows, it might be time to reconsider where I live, but that’s something for next year.
My ever-so-loving family has given me a Nintendo Wii for the holiday. The struggle now is whether to leave in its box for ease of shipment…
A great post on how to prevent innovation.
How many does your organization practice?
