The Captain's BS

Is There Something Wrong with FreeCell in Windows 7?

2011-04-29T23:09:00.013-04:00

I used to lose at FreeCell* all the time. But ever since I upgraded from Windows XP to Windows 7, I have yet to lose a game, which makes me think they removed all of the hard games from the randomizer. What is up with this? Discuss**.

*Background for non-geeks: FreeCell is a solitaire-like card game that is included in Windows XP and later. FreeCell games are enumerated by the random number seed that causes the cards to be dealt in a particular way. Okay, that wasn't much of a non-geek explanation. But you get the idea, right? There are only a certain number of possible hands that can be dealt, and each one has its own unique number.

** I recognize that I have no readers, and so issuing this directive is futile. But futility is the name of this game. Which game? Good question.

If You Don't Have Anything Nice to Say...

2010-11-28T01:48:00.005-05:00

... try one of the following:

Watch a bunch of elephants frolick about in the mud.
Find a Star Wars / Lord of the Rings marathon on basic cable and wonder what Christopher Lee is up to these days.
Lookup the names of dormant volcanoes and decide which one is next going to erupt on a Jewish holiday. (Full disclosure: my wife is Jewish, and we were married on sukkot. Which has nothing to do with volcanoes, but I'm disclosing.)
Scour the digits of pi for your birthday.
Locate the nearest haystack and plant a needle inside.
Launch an eBay storefront that offers a wide assortment of organic burlap bags.
Devise a plan to restore the Transformers lunchbox to its former 1980s-era glory.
Stare at something until you fall asleep.

There are many options.

Thy Cup Hath Been Poisoned

2010-11-24T23:11:00.005-05:00

Several items on my mind as I watch a man with a gun pull into a gas station on an overcast day halfway through an anonymous stretch of the Middle of Nowhere*:

At what point do you have to justify your prioritization of tasks, people, events, dreams, needs, and desires to the bevy of stakeholders who all think they are the majority owner of your life?
How does one chop a salad while in free-fall?
Why does everything on television happen in New York or L.A.? And sometimes Miami?
There are five drunken tigers inside of this box. The box is decreasing in size at a constant rate of 0.38 cm³/s. You have a clothes hanger, $5.72, and the complete Michael Jackson discography. You are also a narcoleptic. What do you do?
Is the passage of timing really speeding up as I age, or do I just not care as much about how long it's been since I last did [x]?
To the cloud! Which doesn't exist!

*Isn't firing a gun at a gas station generally considered to be a Bad Idea?

Two Sentences at 2:22am

2010-11-20T02:22:00.005-05:00

Straining to see the most distant horizon through the thickest of fogs, you fail to notice the obstacle that will thwart your next step; relentlessly scanning the rugged terrain at your feet for hazards, you fail to notice how far off-course your current trajectory is.

A compass and a means to float above the fog solves both of these problems.

How to Start a Paranormal Investigation Team

2010-11-06T19:19:00.002-04:00

It's pretty straightforward, actually.

Assemble Your Team. Your choice of team members is of paramount importance, as their individual personalities, attitudes, and backgrounds will collectively determine how well you are able to perceive and communicate with the spirit world. Your team must be small in number (no more than four or five) so as not to intimidate any ghosts that you may encounter -- remember, they're dead, and reminding them of this can be quite frightening. Generally speaking, the more dejected and/or morose your team members are -- black t-shirts, black jeans, and dyed hair (preferably black) are all pluses -- the more approachable the spirits will find them.

Choose a Leader. Your team leader should have a strong, determined personality, but should also be vulnerable enough to scream like a little girl when the paranormal activity ratchets itself up a notch. (A testosteroney, unmarried man in his mid-to-late 20s with a triangular, barrel-chested build and a tiny head is ideal.) More importantly, the leader must have had a previous personal encounter with the supernatural (preferably during a vaguely-alluded-to troubled childhood), so that he or she has sufficient credibility to outsiders (i.e., greater than none).

Choose a Bitch. One of your team members should be designated as the Bitch. The Bitch is employed (sometimes unwittingly) as bait to lure malevolent spirits into doing harm. Oftentimes, the Bitch finds him or herself locked alone in a morgue, left behind in an attic, or in possession of some kind of attire or object likely to offend the spirits. Be sure to select the most paranoid and/or insecure team member as the Bitch.

Introduce Yourselves. Your team should introduce itself by having the leader complete the following sentences: "My name is ___________. I never used to believe in ghosts until _______________. Since then, I've been on a mission to capture what I saw on video, along with my trusted teammates _________, _______, and ________. Together, we are _______________."

Choose a Location. There are many theories as to what circumstances lead to hauntings, and how to avoid them. In the end, you have to rely on word-of-mouth and your instincts to select a suitable location to investigate. This can be an exhausting and time-consuming process, but fear not: should you run short on leads, you can always fall back onto one of the following options. (1) Return to a location you've visited previously, citing unqualified accounts of "people" hearing disembodied voices speak your name. (2) Investigate a type of place that no one would ever think of as being haunted, such as an aircraft carrier, telephone booth, or furniture store. (3) Sit around and jovially recount investigations of yore while cracking inside jokes.
Bring Lots of Gadgets. Your team should carry a wide-ranging variety of equipment to help you undertake and document your investigation of the paranormal. Night-vision cameras and digital audio-recorders should be a staple for each team member. Other must-have devices include sensors that detect changes in temperature and electromagnetic fields; ideally, they should be highly fault-prone and subject to report wild fluctuations in their readings, since these behaviors can easily be attributed to spirit intervention. But more importantly, your team must have at least one gadget that no one else has, no matter how ridiculous or implausible it is. Examples include: (1) A text-to-speech engine that periodically utters a word or phrase hand-picked by supernatural presences. (2) A white-noise machine attached to an auto-tuner, through which spirits can somehow communicate (with perfect pitch).
Ascribe Things to Stuff. Throughout the course of your investigation, your team will be faced with a never-ending stream of ambiguous data and evidence. Make sure that you highlight and thoroughly analyze the information that can easily support the case for paranormal activity, and quickly disregard the information that cannot. For example, the grainy video that your night-vision cameras capture will frequently feature oversized dust particles and light anomalies; if these phenomena can be wrapped seamlessly into a narrative of unexplained chills and/or demonic possession, do not hesitate to do so. Likewise, your digital audio-recorders will be capturing hours of white noise. Whenever this white noise appears to form a semi-intelligible word (and they will be almost exclusively monosyllabic), be sure to interpret it liberally in your documentation -- e.g., "Rssssshhh" can easily be heard as "Get out, now!" Finally, whenever any of your team members feels cold, disoriented, or otherwise ill after hours in a pitch-black state of sensory deprivation, be sure to film their discomfort up-close while declaring that their "energy is being drained" and/or that they are possessed.
Contact the Travel Channel, A&E, Biography, the History Channel, and National Geographic. Although it's unclear as to what paranormal phenomena have to do with world travel, pop culture, famous people, historical events, or moribund sub-Saharan tribal cultures, these media outlets will show a great deal of interest in your team's work. Be sure to take advantage of this interest to secure sustainable financial backing.

And remember, if all else fails, start a Ca$h 4 G0ld side-business. What could go wrong?

Waxing Nostalgic for IM Conversations of Yesteryear

2010-10-29T23:19:00.011-04:00

A recent episode of the The Big Bang Theory reminded me of an IM conversation I once had with my now-wife several years ago, back before we started dating.

I remember this conversation fondly whenever a reference is made to text-based adventure games... You know, the types of games that all the nerdy kids (whaddup!) played on their Apple IIe's and Apple IIgs's back in the 80s. These games typically place you in a labyrinth of some sort, with various diverging paths to choose from, objects to interact with, and puzzles to solve as you progressed toward some nebulously-defined goal. You progress through the game by typing various free-text commands, such as "go north" or "pick up axe" or "kill troll." (If I recall correctly, there was even an adult-themed one my friends and I stumbled upon once, in which "Fuck Trent" was a valid command that unceasingly produced the response "Trent takes no particular interest in it, but you feel satisfied.")

At any rate, this particular conversation took place across thousands of miles in the wee hours of the morning. She was sitting in an airport somewhere (my money's on SFO), waiting for her red-eye, and I was, as always, burning the midnight oil for no particular reason. It began with a cryptic remark, completely devoid of any context -- something I would later come to recognize as one of her hallmarks -- and went like this:

Her: we are at a crossroads
Me: oh sure
Her: and those crossroads are necessitated by one thing
Me: paths lead north, east, and south
Her: one pivotal fact
Me: there is a flask
Me: what will you do?
Her: er. can I kill the ogre?
Me: there is no ogre
Her: damn!
Her: I will drink!
Me: thou drinkest from ye flask
Me: thou hast died
Her: damn it
Her: do over!
Me: but thou hast been revived as in immortal
Her: hurrah! now, to the north!
Me: you go north, but you trip over ye flask
Her: damn it

Excellent.

Since No One's Reading This, I Can Rant

2010-10-04T16:39:00.006-04:00

...maniacally, using a series of random mathematical equations:

1 + 1 < 3.14159 YOU LYING SACK OF (sin²ϴ + cos²ϴ)!!!

Take your goddamn e^-iπ and SHOVE IT UP YOUR ϕ!!!! Golden ratio my ass.

All of you MORONS who continue to believe that δ²y/δx² = 0 are COMPLETELY λ'd!!! That's right:

λλλλλλλλλλλλλλλλλ

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

Tea For Two Minutes

2010-10-02T22:31:00.005-04:00

I'm not a political blogger. I swear. I leave such a task in the able hands of people who actually follow and know or thing or two about this maddening realm of organized society. But I couldn't help but share this well-articulated -- and obviously left-friendly -- Rolling Stone article on the Tea Party movement (news of which terrorizes my sensibilities on a daily basis):

If you're only up for reading one paragraph, make it this one:

A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing
against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can't imagine it.

We're treading dangerously close to Idiocracy territory, folks. Pay attention, stay informed, and don't forget to think.

Enjoy the Silence. Because I'm a Creep.

2010-09-02T21:14:00.010-04:00

Following up on the abrupt non-sequitur that derailed my almost-triumphant return to the blogosphere...

A few months ago, my wife asked me if I liked choral music (which would have been an odd question if her sister weren't a member of the 18th Street Singers in Washington, DC). I gave some characteristically cryptic answer along the lines of "Eh, only if it's nifty," upon which I was asked to elaborate. Stumbling and stammering for specific examples (as usual), I tried to explain that, while old-school church hymns, regurgitated Baroque compositions, and so forth were not at all interesting to me, I am a fan of (a) the sparse, creative, and/or unexpected use of a choral ensemble, and (b) choral arrangements of music that you wouldn't ever expect to be sung by a choir. (Glee almost qualifies as the latter, but it's technically a capella.)

"Oh sure?" said the wife, who then waved a magic wand and a bunch of assorted baked goods spontaneously materialize. I had failed to explain myself.

Well, as of a few days ago, a seismic example of case (b) smacked me in the face when I saw the trailer for The Social Network that I mentioned a couple of posts ago, which is set to a choral arrangement of Radiohead's "Creep" performed by the Scala & Kolacny Brothers choir. Although "Creep" has never really been my favorite Radiohead song, the arrangement completely floored me, and I stayed awake for another two or three hours listening to this all-female Belgian group. It turns out that they have several arrangements of 80s/90s/00s pop, some of which are complete earworms, and others of which are just kinda bleh. You can find many of their album recordings and performances on Youtube. (And oh yes, you can buy their stuff on iTunes.)

These five in particular I can't get out of my head:

Creep - Hauntingly epic.
Enjoy the Silence - Overcast and foreboding.
Yellow - Beats the crap out of the original arrangement.
Exit Music (For a Film) - This is the song that made me a Radiohead fan, and they fricken nail it. Incredible.
The Blower's Daughter - A tear-jerker for anyone who's seen Closer.

Less catchy, but interesting in unexpected ways:

Under the Bridge - The Upbeat Sesame Street Edition.
Smells Like Teen Spirit - The Ultra-slow "We're Still Mourning Kurt Cobain" Edition.
With or Without You - Great piano accompaniment on this one.
I Touch Myself - Classic!
Bittersweet Symphony - The arrangement is a little disappointing, but it has decent nostalgic value.
Material Girl - Oh yes they did.
ABBA Medley - I know there are ABBA fans reading this blog, so I'm obliged to link to this. (Surprise: does not include "Dancing Queen!")

Anyway, this is why I haven't downloaded the latest Arcade Fire album yet... although I have to say, their interactive music video is an mesmerizing experience if you're rocking an HTML5-compatible browser (e.g. Chrome).

Footnote: For those of you who are curious, a prime example of case (a) occurred way back in 1997 with Final Fantasy VII. Imagine: there you are, sitting in front of your TV with your brand-new Sony PlayStation (the original) -- having slogged through 40-50 hours of one of the most convoluted and ambiguous video game plots of all time (think Lost), you have reached the final battle against a villain who's planning to crash a meteor into the planet so that he can become a god. (See previous comments regarding plot.) Just when you think you've defeated him, you suddenly find yourself in the middle of a ring of swirling clouds, and your nemesis descends from above in the form of an angel with a single bat-wing in place of his right hand, glaring at you and ready to fight some more. A new battle song starts playing, and after about a minute, as you're hacking and slashing and struggling to stay alive, you start to hear an ominous, disembodied choir chanting something in Latin -- holy shit, WTF is that?!

You have to understand: in 1997, video games didn't talk, not to mention sing, or sing in Latin. Pulling off a stunt like this, at the moment of highest tension, was a game-changer, for both the player and the industry. It also made the bad guy's mega-attack that destroys the entire solar system -- a two-minute animated sequence that is easily the most ridiculous move in all of video game history -- seem frivolous by comparison.

(Random-coincidence trivia: the name of this battle song, "One-Winged Angel," is also the name of a Scala & Kolacny album.)

Anyway, that's an example. And it appears that I have once again derailed myself.

Educated-but-uninformed Letters to Congress, Part I

2010-08-30T20:31:00.007-04:00

I don't follow politics as closely as I used to, and there's a reason for it -- it's excruciatingly exhausting and endlessly frustrating. Thanks to the 24-second news cycle, an explosion of cable news channels that don't actually report news (and CNN's decision to follow suit), the rise of social media that no one quite knows how to utilize, and so on, and so forth, our legislative process has essentially degenerated into a schoolyard game of tag-dodgeball-foursquare, in which there are no one-handers, gobstoppers or fishies, and tagbacks are only allowed on Thursdays unless the ball hits you in the face while chewing on Red Hots, in which case you can give cooties to up to five members of the opposing team. (Yes, Teacher is present to preserve the general integrity of the underlying system, but inasmuch as s/he doesn't understand the rules, she is unable to police the game as it unfolds.)

As an adult who has reached the Age of No Credibility within the past year, it is no longer an effective use of my time to track every drop of sulfur that spews forth from the bottomless fountain of vagaries, platitudes, scandals, and hypocrisies that fill the 3000-bazillahertz of "news" spectrum everyday. Rather, I just try to stay informed on the issues that are going to matter in the long-run -- e.g. energy policy, caring for the environment, fixing Social Security/Medicare, unemployment/job growth (and yes, foreign policy, but it often makes my head hurt if it doesn't put me to sleep) -- and periodically check in on the status of how these issues are being addressed. Or not, as the case has increasingly -- maddeningly -- tended to be of late.

Do I know what it's like to actually work in Washington? Do I know what kind of micro-scale wheeling and dealing, arm-twisting, and general slithering actually needs to happen in order to pass legislation? Do I have any understanding of congressional hierarchy and the arcane procedural rules that govern both bodies? Absolutely not. But I'd like to think that I'm a fairly well-educated, intelligent person, who, not knowing any better about the nuts and bolts of what goes on inside the beltway, could make some helpful suggestions. (I realize that Obama probably felt the same way before we elected him to be eternally suffocated by pollsters and political consultants.)

And so, without further ado, here is the first installment.

Dear Members of Congress:
Please stop screwing around with Roger Clemens. Most baseball fans have long presumed his guilt with regard to the use of performance-enhancing drugs, and could care less whether his self-delusional lies constituted a felony deserving of 18 months imprisonment and a fine that amounts to 0.000011% of our nation's GDP. There are more pressing issues for you to address. Speaking of which (and of our GDP):
It's the economy, stupid.
People are not fundamentally unhappy because we're becoming a socialist state, or paying historically-low taxes, or continuing to take a self-contradictory attitude toward immigrants, or adding marginal amounts to record paper-money deficits that have been with us since the the early aughts. They're unhappy because they don't have a job, because their 401(k)'s (if they were lucky enough to have one) have been cut in half, and because it seems like everyone else is getting bailed out while they're being told to be frugal. Ask yourself: how many people in Middle America do you think would rather block the construction of a mosque at Ground Zero (conveniently disregarding the fact that there are already two within four blocks) than feel secure about their employment situation and financial well-being?
To Republicans, in particular: stop fillibustering everything. Not only is this a ludicrous waste of your own time, but wasn't it you guys who kept clamoring for a simple up-or-down vote on the Bush tax cuts (which, by the way, added $1 trillion to our national debt) and hinted at the "nuclear option" of eliminating the fillibuster itself? Look, it's pretty simple: if you were against the fillibuster then, certainly you must still be against it now (because you established in 2004 that changing your mind on an issue is unacceptable), so naturally you're voting for cloture 100% of the time, right? More generally, if you're so concerned with how egregiously damaging the Democrats' propositions will be to our nation's future, surely you have an intellectually-honest counter-proposal for each measure that you block for our collective safety?
To Democrats, in particular: if you're the party of change, let's see it. Since you've had control of the White House and both houses of Congress, you've:
Spent several months passing a healthcare-reform bill (which, by the way, was probably priority #4 on many of your constituents' lists) that, in your efforts to compromise with an uncompromising opposition and to ensure that the flow of re-election campaign dollars remained intact, became so watered down that it essentially became a government-mandated handout to the insurance industry (but hey, at least it doesn't kick in until 2014).
Passed a similarly diluted financial "reform" bill, in which many of the regulations that were repealed during the anything-goes 1980s and 90s remain repealed, and under which financial institutions are still free to become too big to fail (and to be bailed out at taxpayer expense), and for-profit stock exchanges and high-frequency trading systems can team up to knock 1,000 points off the Dow in five minutes. Meanwhile, banks are continuing to borrow money from the Fed at near 0% while not loaning it out to consumers and small businesses (which, you know, might, I dunno, stimulate the economy and create jobs?) because it's more profitable for them to invest those funds in treasuries and/or route them to their proprietary trading desks. How was none of this addressed?
Displayed a remarkable tendency to cower in the face of misinformation. If you have a good idea that you truly believe in, you should defend it. If someone puts out a press release saying that bill that cuts taxes for the middle class will raise taxes on 99% of Americans, you should put out a press release correcting that misinformation and calling out / into question its sources and motives. Just because someone is proclaiming the earth is flat louder than you are proclaiming it is round doesn't mean you should back down.
To everyone: You're adults. You're public servants. You're our representatives on the world stage. Act like it.
Sincerely,
The Captain

(Fair readers, please accept my apologies for running out of steam... I had like maybe five or six more points of discussion on my mind, but I'd actually like to have a life this evening.)

I Do Not Need to Explain My Absence

2010-08-26T00:40:00.001-04:00

Many events have transpired on or near the surface of the earth since I lasted posted. Most oddly, I've received 38+ comments (apparently authored by an army of Chinese webbots) on my previous post, for reasons I can barely fathom, even with a #2 pencil lodged in my skull. But, prehaps most significantly, I've become a homeowner. This quintessential part of The American Dream, which is not very easily realized (if at all) here in the Great Concrete Desert of the Northeastern United States, also happens to be a lot of work. Things break and need to be fixed. Other things need to be blown up and rebuilt, because they weren't the way you wanted them. And, of course, everyone wants a rocket-house.

"O Lord, bless this rocket-house and all who may dwell within the rocket-house." -- Homer Simpson

However ruinous the trials of homeownership (not to mention the mortgage-brokering and refinancing process, especially when people who never passed Remedial Counting are involved) may or may have not been thus far, they are not the reason why I have been absent for something like a year. Indeed, as Occham's Razor (the only Unified Theory of Everything you need) would have it, the reason is far simpler: I'm lazy. And highly prone to distraction, aimless ambling, and the drunken-man's tendency to inevitably fall into vat of carbolic acid.

OMG. I just saw a trailer for The Social Network, which should be all counts be a hilariously god-awful movie (a la Tokyo Drift), but this particular trailer is actually very well-done, strangely moving, and unexpectedly (unintentionally?) meaningful.

http://www.sonypictures.com/previews/movies/thesocialnetwork/clips/2300/

Set against a haunting, choral rendition of Radiohead's "Creep," what you see for the first minute doesn't resemble a movie trailer at all, but rather a series of all-too-familiar images, phrases, and clicks... And by the end of this minute, as the trailer loses its disguise, you start to wonder, within the contemplative, introspective realm that the song lyrics conjure up: "Has this been my life for the last six years? Has this been all of our lives for the last six years? What motives drive us to spend so much time doing this?" (Alas, I doubt that these are the questions about which this flick concerns itself.)

Anyway, I'm back. For now, at least. More to come. Theoretically.

Can I Post From My Droid?

2010-08-25T21:54:00.002-04:00

Yep, apparently I can. Aw shizz.

(Why did I do this?)

The Assumption of the Average

2009-08-15T15:54:00.015-04:00

Every so often, it occurs to me that I've duped myself in the qualitative evaluation of something.

Today, in pursuit of simple and arbitrary pleasures, I decided to stroll over to the local Panera to grab a late lunch and some free Wi-Fi action on their open-air patio. (Yes, these are the things in life that make me happy.) I consider myself to be fairly well-versed in Panera's offerings, as my co-worker and I usually patronize the one on Route 9 in Natick every Monday. I don't really need to look at the menu (except to determine whether a favorite seasonal offering has returned), I just usually blurt out one of three or four of their sandwiches that I like and get it with a bag of chips and a salad (occasionally tacking on a smoothie or an iced chai latte). The cashier hands me a pager, and five minutes later, I've got my food.

Unfortunately, that's not exactly an accurate description of the Panera experience that I had today. After ordering my food (turkey sandwich, chips, salad, and an iced chai latte) and receiving my pager, I sat down at a table and waited for the pager to buzz. After five minutes, I wandered over to the specialty drink counter (no latte yet), and then continued over to the food prep area to monitor the progress of my order.

This is where things started to get strange. There were two people (likely college or high school kids on hiatus) assigned to sandwich- and salad-making duty, but what they were actually doing was far less clear. (From what I could tell, it involved slowly walking in circles while occasionally commenting about someone named Roy.) Five other people (including an extremely pregnant woman, who I'll call Claire due to her striking resemblance to Emilie de Ravin) who had ordered before me were also standing and waiting, their faces awash with a mix of concern and irritation. At some point, one of them looked over and noticed everyone waiting, and doing his best to conceal an expression that can only be described as the Universal "Oh Shit" Face (which I hereby trademark, along with the acronym UOSF) and tore off a chain of three or four order tickets from a printer device.

Clearly, I wasn't getting my sandwich anytime soon, so I wandered back to the beverage counter. Still no iced chai lattes in sight, and a thorough scientific analysis of the situation led me to hypothesize that this was because no one was working at the station. Claire wandered over at some point, looking physically distressed, and perhaps this triggered someone to actually pay attention, because it wasn't ten seconds later that the young lad who'd taken my order -- visibly sporting a UOSF -- was asking us whether we were waiting for anything. Claire, who looked like she was in immense physical pain and holding back tears (I didn't know whether it was my place to ask her if she was okay, but I nearly did) indicated that she was waiting for a frozen lemonade, and I reminded him of my iced chai latte. The young man nodded, murmured some excuse about thinking that "someone else already helped you guys," and got to work.

Meanwhile, back at the food prep counter, there were several plates assembled with various sandwiches and salads, but since none of them looked like my order (at least not within a 95% confidence interval), and since my pager hadn't yet buzzed, I figured that none of them were mine. However, seeing as how the sandwich-makers had returned to their walking-in-circles-while-discussing-Roy routine, I stepped up to take a closer look. Sure enough, one of the order tickets matched mine, even though there was a baguette instead of chips, and even though they'd never rung my pager. After badgering one of the so-called employees to exchange the baguette for chips, I returned to the beverage counter.

"Here you go, buddy," said the drink-maker. It was a strawberry smoothie. "Sorry I forgot about your smoothie."

At this point, correcting him -- again -- seemed to be the ultimate exercise in futility, so I took the damn smoothie and left to eat.

As I ate, the simple thought Wow, this Panera sucks crossed my mind, as I'm sure happens to many of us at the conclusion of a similar experience. But then it occurred to me to ask: was that necessarily true? Is it really this particular Panera that sucks, or do all Paneras generally suck except for the one that I happen to patronize on a weekly basis? What if the abysmal customer-service experience that I had just been through was, in fact, closer to the norm than it was an exception to the rule?

When we evaluate an instance of a particular object or experience for the first time (whether it be dining at a Panera restaurant, playing whiffleball, or riding in a hot air balloon), I think we have a tendency to presume that the instance we're evaluating is perfectly average and falls in the middle of the bell curve of all possible instances of the same object/experience. From a statistical perspective, this seems like a reasonable presumption: 68% of your impressions will be of an "average" instance, and 95% of the time you'll be evaluating a "roughly average" instance. It also makes sense from the standpoint of natural selection: if, the first time your little brother Grrglmmick tried to jump onto a sleeping T-Rex he got eaten, it's reasonable to assume (for the purposes of preserving your gene pool) that Grrglmmick's experience is what "usually" happens when you try to jump onto a sleeping T-Rex.

And yet, thanks to the beauty of statistics, there will still be many cases in your life where your initial impression of something is actually one of those outliers that resides within 2.5% of either end of the bell-curve. (Recall the saga of Red Sox pitcher Clay Buchholz who, in his second major-league start, threw a no-hitter, and then proceeded to be one of the worst pitchers in all of baseball for the next half-year until he was sent back to the minors.) It is cases such as these that cause you to recognize and question your natural inclination to give greater weight to your initial impressions of something, and doing this can feel a little unsettling, perhaps even humbling, as though you're realizing that you've pulled off a doozy of a con-job on yourself.

But if you ask me, it's an acceptable consequence of living in a universe that, in spite of being doomed to an eventual heat-death at the hands of entropic degradation, takes a thankfully (and thanklessly) unpredictable path toward its final destination.

The Vampire Blood in My Wine Glass Speaks!

2009-03-01T02:51:00.004-05:00

"There are too many bears that have fallen into bottomless pits with trapezoidal openings."

"The wheel upon which are all spinning -- it measures 392.7 meters across, even though Napolean's scientists incorrectly defined the meter as being 1/10,000,000th of the distance between the north pole and the equator, whereas nowadays it is simply defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second. Morons."

"I was at peace with my current position in the space-time continuum, but then Locke let Ben move the island and now we're all randomly warping back and forth through time, occasionally suffering from a fatal nosebleed. Ah crap."

"When a child hunts for easter eggs, he or she does not expect the act of finding one to cause his or her basket to explode. Yet this happens all the time. Why?"

"1, 1, 2, 3, 5... Eureka! Awk! Pah-cuck!" (all birds speak chicken)

"You should get contacts because you can't see anything. I recommend a +1.25 for your right eye, and a link of hot italian sausage for your stomach."

"If cows could fly around and devour Billy Corgan, the world would become devoid of music that no one has listened to in over a decade."

"Sports teams playing each other is funny when the combination of the names of the participating teams and the result implies a balance of power that makes no sense in the natural world. For example: Eagles 27, Bears 3. In real life, it would be: Bears 4,398,186, Eagles 4."

"I am the Man in the Iron Mask, and I can shoot fireballs."

Internet Explorer Mobile and File Upload: Utterly Flimsy

2009-02-11T21:19:00.012-05:00

Okay, a brief respite from the usual random babbling. This post has a mission. And if you're not a web developer, your eyes are about to glaze over.

Ready?

So, I just spent the entirety of my day yesterday trying to get one conceptually-simple thing to work. As part of an ongoing mobile web application development project, all I needed to do was to enable a smartphone or PDA user to upload a file from their device to a server. In today's alleged "Web 2.0" word, this type of file-upload capability is virtually ubiquitous across most interactive and community-based websites.

To enable file-upload in a standard desktop browser, all a web developer has to do is include something like the following code within a web form:


<form action="Upload.aspx" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data">
   <input type="file" name="MyFile">
   <input type="submit" value="Upload!">
</form>

Additionally, if you're using ASP.NET as your development platform (as I am), you can just use this little snippet:


<asp:FileUpload runat="server" ID="MyFile">
<asp:Button runat="server" ID="btnUpload" OnClick="btnUpload_Click">

Continuing with the ASP.NET example for a moment, to actually process the upload, you write a handler for the btnUpload button's Click event, like so:


protected void btnUpload_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) 
{
   if (MyFile.HasFile) 
   {
       // Do something with the file here, such as:
      MyFile.SaveAs(Path.Combine(@"C:\Uploads", MyFile.FileName);
   }
}

Simple, no? (I bet even some of you non-coders were able to follow along...)

Indeed, in most cases, it really is that simple. For just about any modern web browser, whether it's Internet Explorer, FireFox, Chrome, or Opera, and whether it's running on your PC, PDA, or smartphone, this example will work without any hassle. Of course, having read the title of this post, you know that there's one browser that's a glaring exception to this rule, and that's Internet Explorer Mobile. (Strangely enough, another one is the version of Safari that runs on the iPhone.)

"Now, what just a minute!" you might say. "Mobile browsers are still fairly primitive creatures, and only recently have a scant handful started to support file upload. I mean, yes, if I were in charge of a team that was building a mobile browser, I'd make file upload a high-priority task, since of course most mobile application developers are going to want to be able to take advantage of their users' rapidly advancing photo and video-capturing capabilities..."

Well, yes, this is technically true. Many mobile web browsers are just achieving a basic level of usability, and there are many mobile browser vendors who openly state that their products do not yet support file upload. Microsoft, for its part, has stated that Internet Explorer Mobile running on Windows Mobile 6 Professional Edition (but not Classic) does support file upload. And while that is also technically accurate, their implementation of this feature is so utterly broken (and in such an asinine way) that you'd be hard-pressed to convince yourself that they're telling anything resembling the truth.

So, what's wrong with file upload in IE Mobile? To the casual debugger stepping through the ASP.NET code such as the earlier example, you may (or may not) notice one or more of the following symptoms:

The Click event of the Upload button never fires.

The Request.Files collection is empty.

The HasFile property of the FileUpload control is false.

In spite of the above, the Request.ContentLength property is larger than the size of the uploaded file.

The contents of Request.InputStream include the uploaded file's data, along with some (but not all) of the ASP.NET form values.

All ViewState information on the page is lost. (This seems to happen with any ASP.NET multipart/form-data postback, in my experience, regardless of browser.)

Many (but not all) members of the Request.Params collection are missing.

After spending many hours capturing, studying, and stepping through the raw HTTP requests and responses of a simple file-upload web application and a variety of desktop and mobile web browsers, I discovered that the following conditions will cause IE Mobile's multipart HTTP request to become corrupted:

The user uploads a file whose name exceeds 15 characters in length. (This length includes the file's ".ext" extension, but does not include any directory path that the user supplies.) For example, if the user attempts to upload a file called File1234.doc (12 characters), the upload request will succeed, but if the user tries to upload a file called File12345678.doc (16 characters), the upload request will become corrupted.

The <input type="file"> or asp:FileUpload tag appears on an ASP.NET page that uses a Master Page. This one baffles me. I can't even begin to think of why using an ASP.NET Master page would cause IE Mobile to corrupt the upload request. Does it have to do with the way ASP.NET names and renders a container's child controls with all of those funky dollar signs and such? I've read that it's because the Master Page form's enctype doesn't get set to multipart/form-data, but in my testing I did not find that to be true. At any rate, if anyone who knows the answer to this little puzzle, please provide your explanation in a comment to this post, and you'll rewarded with a gold star (possibly one gleaned from a Google Images search).

Of these two bugs, it's the first one that really gets me. 15 characters?! What is this, 1988 and MS-DOS 4.01?! My guess is that this is some kind of non-terminated string oversight, most likely because some nitwit declared and allocated a char* buffer that was 16 bytes long, but then forgot to check the size of the actual string he wanted to load into that buffer, causing some kind of memory corruption that cascades into the text of the HTTP request.

Given these obstacles, what's a mobile web developer to do to get around them? Well, keep in mind that Opera Mobile -- which is now the default browser on the Windows Mobile 6.1 phones that Verizon, Sprint and AT&T are offering -- handles file upload requests flawlessly. (In fact, when I compared the multipart HTTP requests of Opera Mobile and the desktop version of Internet Explorer side-by-side, I noticed virtually no difference.) So, really, all you have to worry about is dealing with IE Mobile.

Thankfully, IE Mobile has pretty good JavaScript support, and you can use this to your advantage when you design your file upload web form. One possibility is to have your web page inject a special JavaScript validation function if it detects that the browser is IE Mobile, and wire your Upload button to run this script when clicked. All the script has to do is check the length of the file upload control's text (making sure to strip the path from the filename), and if it exceeds 15 characters, warn the user about IE Mobile's limitation and prevent the form's submission.

Here's an example:

ASP.NET Web Form:


<script type="text/javascript">
function ValidateFile(ctlidFileUpload) {
   var fileUpload = document.getElementById(ctlidFileUpload);
   if (fileUpload) {
      var sFilename = fileUpload.value;
      var nLastSlash = sFilename.lastIndexOf('\\');
      if (nLastSlash >= 0) {
         sFilename = sFilename.substring(nLastSlash + 1, sFilename.length);
         if (sFilename.length > 15) {
            alert("Internet Explorer Mobile requires that the document's filename (including extension) be 15 characters or less. Please rename this file and try again.");
            return false;
         }
      }
   }
   return true;
}
</script>

Code-behind:


protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
   // Inject validation script if necessary
   if (Request.Browser.IsBrowser("IEMobile"))
   {
      btnUpload.OnClientClick = "return ValidateFile('" + fileUpload.ClientID + "')";
   }
}

As for the issues with Master Pages, well, think of your file-upload page as having the same role and function as an "Open File" dialog box would in a desktop application. Essentially, you're just prompting the user to select a file for some greater, more interesting purpose. Does the dialog box need to have the same look-and-feel as the overall application? Not really, and if you think about it, neither does your file-upload page. You can maintain a relatively smooth, continuous user experience by just including a few visual cues (colors, logos, etc.) from your Master Page on your file-upload page. Give it a try and walk through the application flow -- you'll be surprised.

ERR-OR. Sentence Fragment.

2009-01-31T15:03:00.006-05:00

On the eve of Super Bowl CCXCVII, let us take a moment to examine a particularly fascinating aspect of sports broadcasting, one that many people typically digest unaware, like the thousands-plus calories present in a typical McDonald's value meal.

Recall the last sporting event that you either watched on TV or listened to on the radio. Can you still hear the voices of the announcers and color analysts who were calling the play-by-play and providing commentary on the competitors' current winning streak, assist-to-turnover ratio, or ballpark-adjusted O.P.S.? Excellent.

Now, pretend for a moment that you were deaf, and were watching the same sporting event with closed-captioning on. What does the close-captioning feed look like? Perhaps something like this?

Allen to Garnett on the block. Better hurry. Kicks it out to Pierce and-- batted away by Iverson! Recovered by Perkins, but a 24-second shot-clock violation.

Or this?

Two out, bases loaded for Ortiz. Ortiz hitting .352 with runners in scoring position. This Yankee crowd getting a little uneasy. Sabathia into the stretch. The pitch. Line shot down the first-base line! One run in. Ellsbury right behind. Nady having trouble getting it out of the corner. Pedroia rounding third, the throw to the plate. Not in time! And the Red Sox take a 5-4 lead on a bases-clearing triple by David Ortiz.

Now, riddle me this: if you were to transcribe the play-by-play commentary for an entire sporting event and hand it into your high school English teacher, how many boxes of red pens would he or she have to buy (assuming Costco bulk quantities) to elevate the grammar to an acceptable level?

Indeed, most sports announcers speak in sentence fragments, and I think that this is something we easily accept because those fragments are mostly descriptive in nature and complement what we can otherwise plainly see (or hear) about the event and situation in question. There does appear to be some variation from sport to sport, however.

Referencing the above examples, I've found that most baseball commentators frequently omit the word "is" (and "there is") from their sentences, even in between plays when there is no action to describe and including the "is" would produce a complete, grammatically-sound sentence. (e.g., "Ortiz hitting .352 with runners in scoring position.") Basketball announcers, by contrast, seem to have a tendency to end their sentences in nouns that directly reference a rule of the game that has just been applied (e.g., "Recovered by Perkins, but a 24-second shot-clock violation" or "Roy drives through the lane, and a foul!") And although I haven't watched enough football to pick up on any patterns (maybe I can use Joe Buck's cross-sport announcing as a constant), tomorrow's Super Bowl may provide an ample opportunity if and when the Steelers find themselves up by 47 points.

In closing: if you're planning on taking the TOEFL, please be careful not watch any sports, because they will cause you to fail.

Next time: transcribing movie trailers, and the hilarity that ensues.

Exercising the Right to be Arbitrary, Episode #391

2009-01-10T20:14:00.009-05:00

Today, whilst purchasing a decanter at Ye Olde Crate & Barrel, I encountered a very large point-of-sale console that happily offered to process my credit card transaction. Its dimensions were approximately 16 inches wide by 12 inches tall, and it prompted me to sign for my purchase within a box that was approximately 10 inches wide by 6 inches tall. This seemed excessive, so I decided to draw a giant smiley face above my signature.

The cashier seemed amused. She asked me whether I did this all the time. I said no, this was the first time I'd done it.

Then I pillaged the Sweet Factory.

How to Make a Speculative Documentary About the Apocalypse

2009-01-05T23:02:00.006-05:00

Well, this week is Armageddon Week on the History Channel, and as the owner of a month-old plasma TV, that means it's time to watch a bunch of fiery, high-definition explosions bathe my living room in a hearty warm glow. The week's lineup includes an in-depth analysis (and CGI re-creation!) of the events depicted in the book of Revelation, and exposé on The Bible Code, and no fewer than thirty-seven treatments of Nostradamus' verses. As a child who kept the crushingly vacuous boredom of church at bay by reading the Book of Revelation over and over, I am So. There.

Now, you'd think that producing a show about Armageddon could carry a hefty price tag, what with all of the CGI artists you'd have to hire to animate a lamb with seven eyes and seven horns, gravely wounded and bleeding profusely "as It had been slain" (Revelation 5:6), not to mention the crazy Bacchaen woman riding the Beast with seven heads and ten horns. (I mean, there's a lot of careful decision-making involved when it comes to allocating the horns across the heads. Does each head get a horn? Which heads get more than one horn? For the heads with multiple horns, are the horns symmetrically arranged?) Alas, it is not so. In fact, just about any ol' Joe with a digital camcorder and an iBook can easily throw together their own end-of-days TV special by following these simple guiding principles:

Hire the most sinister-sounding narrator you can find. Test their worth by having them read Goodnight Moon and determining whether the child's head rotates a full 360 degrees in your mind.

Include several shots of a modern U.S. city being hit with one or more fiery projectiles streaking out of the sky. Limit the voiceover content to vague descriptions of "absolute destruction" and "complete chaos" -- do not attempt to describe which city it is, what the projectiles are, or what is generally going on.

Whenever you are filming something benign (e.g. some children playing Four Square), shake the camera violently to indicate that a massive earthquake is sweeping the entire planet as the Final Battle rages in the heavens.

Occasionally punctuate the narration with a random Bible verse (not necessarily one from the Book of Revelation or having anything to do with Armageddon), preferably voiced by a retired Shakespearean actor.
"For where two or three are gathered in my name,
there am I among them."
-- Matthew 18:20
Ensure that the verse appears on-screen as it is read. Use wet, hand-written ink on a yellowed scroll if you can.

Make at least one mention of Nostradamus, and show him to be an ominous-looking, age-worn man with a beard, a funny hat, and a crystal ball. Helpful hint: add pupil-less, glowing eyes for effect.

Ensure that the soundtrack features a full-bodied choir chanting something ominous in Latin, Sanskrit, or some other ancient language. If you are unable to translate a phrase such as "four the horseman blacken the sky and sunder the earth," Google the language of your choice in conjunction with the word "phrases" and use whatever result you get by clicking the I'm Feeling Lucky button.

Consult various subject-matter experts for their thoughts on the Book of Revelation, the current situation in the Middle East, nuclear arms races, and global warming, but do not mention or display their names, titles, or qualifications at any time.

If at any point you feel that you are running out of material, keep cutting back to the shot of the anonymous U.S. city getting blown up by unspecified fiery projectiles. Show this scene in slow-motion or with negative coloration to lend it a sense of variety.

Mark My Words

2008-11-29T02:10:00.004-05:00

If it ever turns out that, for whatever reason, I'm unable to drop $109,000 on a Tesla Roadster, a new-build DeLorean will have to do.

In the event that it doesn't come with a Flux Capacitor, I'll have to settle for the iPod jack, heated seats, and bluetooth integration kit... maybe the backup camera too.

On the Rediscovery of the Red Savory

2008-11-26T22:40:00.006-05:00

The other day, I found myself standing in the middle of a chessboard, where the following took place:

Knight to C3
Pawn B6 to C6
Rook A1 to A5
Fig Newton J1 to incisor L2

Then the grayfish proclaimed to all through my ear-trumpet:

All hail the great tree of the shrouded everyman
For its diaspora has spread to twelve continents
And is broadcast to the other five in 1080p

Indeed, it was a time of accelerated enlightenment that promised a bounty of further discovery with every passing millisecond, where old habits quickly and silently faded into the teeming switchgrass, and even older ones sunk into the gaping sandtrap behind the 6th green. Jonah's gaze absent-mindedly followed the tangled loops of his shoelaces, as he pondered the fact that his name would never again be mentioned beyond the bounds of this sentence.

Excelsior! We have transcended the anonymity of a misplaced black button floating in a distant cranberry pond.

From within the sarcophagus, I could hear this voice and the footsteps that preceded him: they had become numb from frequent immersion in chilled marmalade. As the voice continue to mutter to itself about the proper aging policies for non-liquid receivables, I wondered how it was that I became suddenly encased in a sarcophagus in the middle of a chessboard. To be sure, King Tut had recently appeared to me in a dream, but his incessant circumlocution on topics that bore no relevance to my rapidly-declining home value prevented me from waking up for 37 days. The sum of 3 and 7 is 10. Knight C3 to D5. As a child, Ancient Egyptian civilization captivated my imagination (often through such vehicles as Choose Your Own Adventure Books and Super Mario Brothers), and I knew that, someday, I would visit. That day was not now; it was last Wednesday.

By the time I had found the crowbar at my feet and pried the sarcophagus open with my elbow (after I had swallowed the crowbar), it had become phosphorescently clear that I had been checkmated by the ham-and-cheese sandwich parked at G5. The hour of ultimate defeat was at hand, for I had failed to obtain the secret 1-UP contained within the Level 5 Warp Zone, and consequently had no lives remaining in reserve. The sandwich lurched forward, sometimes erratically, sometimes delicately, and sometimes in a trumpet-accentuated figure-eight pattern, as the butter-like fabric of space-time melted cleanly and evenly into Jean Valjean's cosmic bowl of lightly-salted popcorn.

And so it came to pass that, at some point in time -- or perhaps never -- I was unexpectedly quashed from existence by a common lunchbox item. But at that meaningless point where the left-hand and right-hand limits of my consciousness diverged to opposite infinities, it could be summarily stated by an unidentified, omniscient third-person narrator that I felt more like myself than anyone else ever did or ever will.

Teacup Politics

2008-09-03T22:55:00.010-04:00

As I watch the political convention circuses run their course, I've become increasingly struck (and alarmed) by the degree to which the two parties differ not in their beliefs and viewpoints, but in their observation of the facts that give rise to these viewpoints. There's definitely one side with which I tend to agree much more often than the other (and in more naive times I've even taken sides with another), but it's still disturbing to hear both sides (perhaps one a bit more often than the other) twist simple, objective facts into half-truths and outright lies that have little value in terms of their ability to suggest and provide any semblence of solution to the Average American (the definition of which can sometimes only mean the wealthiest 2% of us).

And so, in this spirit, I present to you a simple cup of tea, as viewed through the eyes of both major parties at their political conventions. (Note that my presentation may be slightly affected by my conviction that the VP acceptance speech that I just watched was largely based on a fictional reality that some people want all of us to accept as truth, and go to great lengths to suggest that we "don't get it" if we happen to disagree.)

Party #1: "Look at this tea cup! It is filled with a warm, aromatic Earl Grey with a dash of cream. Why, then, is it served with two lemon slices, if most people do not like their tea with both cream and lemon -- surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman! Perhaps we should make it a policy to always serve both the cream and lemon separate from the tea itself, so that people may be empowered to choose for themselves whether they want lemon or cream. And if they want both -- well, although I'd personally never do it, who am I to decide what one does with tea, lemon, and cream within the privacy of one's own home?

Party #2: Here before us stands the finest wine decanter in all the land. Made of the highest quality glass blown and shaped by American Standard Glass in Wichita, Kansas -- the heart of the American great plains! -- she proudly holds a full bottle of your favorite Appalachian-made wine. How could anyone not recognize and appreciate the simple, elegant beauty of its craftmanship? Nevermind what the tea-loving, elitist news media might suggest: this piece was not meant to hold Earl Grey! (After all, we valiantly fought off the British in 1776 and again in 1812 -- why would we disgrace this work of art with such a vile liquid?) Its use is quite simple and straightforward: simply open the wine bottle of your choosing and empty its contents into the decanter -- that's it! There's no need to add lemon, cream, or any other unnecessary foreign substance... and since there is no such need, why don't we enact legislation requiring that wine decanters of this quality only hold the finest wines -- those made in Appalachia, of course -- and no other drink?

Today's Random Depictions of Jesus

2008-08-28T04:30:00.003-04:00

Super Space Defender Jesus:

Backwards Crucifix Rocket Jesus:

"O Lord, protect this Rocket-house
And all who may dwell within the Rocket-house."
-- Homer Simpson, "Mountain of Madness"

Frosted Nightlight Jesus:

Boob-secured Beaded Jesus:

Steel Raptor Terror Jesus:

Creamsicle Sunset Rifle Jesus:

Bloody Bear-slaying Forgiveness Jesus:

Restoring that Beautiful Copper Tone

2008-08-20T01:32:00.016-04:00

Why don't we charter a C-130 to dump a few million gallons of Tarn-X on the Statue of Liberty? Think of all the shiny copper goodness.

And it would only cost $480 million.*

*($5.00/12 oz. Tarn-X)(8 oz. Tarn-X/ft.²)(144M ft.²) + ($4600/hour C-130)(1 hour C-130)
= ($66.67/gal. Tarn-X)(7.2M gal. Tarn-X) + $4600
= $480M + $4600
= $480M

The Captain's Cookbook, Part II

2008-08-11T03:18:00.003-04:00

Ladies and Gentle Ben, it's once again time for...

THE CAPTAIN'S COOKBOOK
Applying a Services Oriented Architecture to Culinary Design Problems

Holy Hellfire Tacos
Prep time: 5 minutes (more if you like to rub spicy stuff in your eyes)
Cooking time: 15-20 minutes

Ingredients:

Approx. 1 pound ground turkey, beef, chicken, pork, or Soylent Green
8-12 whole wheat or corn tortillas
1 package Ortega (or Old El Paso) taco seasoning
1 small bottle Ortega (or Old El Paso) taco sauce (try the green chili sauce for kicks)
4 bell peppers of varying colors
1 yellow or white onion
1-2 habanero peppers (2 = you're f'in crazy)
1 block of sharp cheddar cheese
1 cucumber, and maybe some tomatoes
Some amount of lettuce, baby spinach, or other roughage

Cooking Instructions:

In some sort of frying pan that can also be used as a weapon, brown the meat and drain whatever fat is left from the pan.
While that's going on, cut the onions and non-habanero peppers into whatever combination of slices, chunks, and cubes you find most aesthetically appealing and sautee them for a bit. Whenever you decide that they're done, set them aside.
When the meat's all set and/or the spirit moves you, stir in the contents of the Ortega taco seasoning packet into the pan along with whatever amount of water it tells you to add (3/4 cup?), and let it simmer (covered) for 5-10 minutes.
Meanwhile, carefully cut up the habanero peppers into little bits, but for the love of God do not touch your eyes or any other exposed membrane for the next 48 hours unless you feel like entering a massive and completely indestructible world of pain!!!!(I suppose you could wear gloves while you cut the peppers, but that's cheating.)
Dump the habanero peppers into the pan and let everything simmer for a few minutes more -- maybe chop up some of the cucumber or try to discover a new prime number while you wait -- and then shut off the burner.
Fill the tortillas with some combination of taco meat, sauteed veggies, shredded cheese, chopped cucumbers/tomatoes, and leafy greens. Finish with taco sauce.
If you discovered a new prime number in Step 5, you might want to write it down and show it to someone.

John Edwards' Political Career - R.I.P., 2008

2008-08-10T03:43:00.007-04:00

I'm sure by now that the Internet is rife with pundits and bloggers sounding off about the extramarital affair that John Edwards had with one of his videographers in 2006, so I need not waste much time discussing how unfortunate an act this was, for both the man and for what he used to stand for in American politics. (All I can add are my deepest sympathies for my lovely B&B hostess in New Hampshire who, in late 2007, became so smitten with Edwards and his message after he held a get-together at her house that she actually decided to pay attention to politics for the first time in her life. That's gotta be one hell of a comedown.)

However, as the hour grows late, my eyelids grow heavy, and NBC's Olympics coverage lapses into reruns that are still labeled "LIVE" for some odd reason, I'd like to add the following two-pence on the Edwards topic by referencing a clip from the AP newswire:

Former campaign manager David Bonior said he was one of the thousands of friends and supporters that Edwards betrayed, and he shuddered when thinking about what might have happened had Edwards beaten Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama in the party's primaries.

"You can't lie in politics and expect to have people's confidence," he said.

My response: see Presidential Election, United States of America, 2004; results of.

Speaking Words of Wisdom

2008-08-04T21:29:00.006-04:00

When you buy a book, most likely because you intend to read it, make sure that you remember that it is on your shelf after you place it there.

If you take a minute to look around, you will realize that most of the things in the universe are larger than you. Therefore, whenever you find yourself in doubt, assume that you are not fat.

Any musical composition can be enhanced by the addition of crash cymbals, tubular bells, and lightly-tapped bongo drums.

Every day presents a multitude of opportunities, and the most fruitful -- and challenging -- will often catch you by surprise. Be sure to enter up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right B, A, Start before taking them on.

If your state government allows it, keep your first set of license plates.

Avoid Scylla and Charybdis at all costs.

If you have an entrepreneurial mind, try to find a commercially-viable way to build a scale model of Crater Lake from a flooded football stadium. Optimize your business model to minimize operating costs and accidental drownings, and refer to the image at left when determining the correct placement of Wizard Island. The use of papier-mâché as a building material is not recommended, unless you are trying to decorate your habitat with gasoline-filled piñatas.

Most larger mammals are funnier on rocket-skates, especially grizzley bears.

Things Are Better When Multiplied by 1000

2008-07-29T01:03:00.023-04:00

Move Over, The Fast and the Furious, there's a new king of the racing movie genre in town:

Note that this movie is not a remake of the 1975 Sylvester Stallone classic shown below (but does seem to draw on it for conceptual inspiration):

Incidentally, the latter flick makes me wax nostalgic for the twilight years of the 20th century, when arbitrarily appending a large multiple of 1000 to the title of something was a trendy way to invoke futurism and instantaneously imbue said something with highly sophisticated, larger-than-life qualities that vaguely suggested omnipotence in a dues ex machina kind of way.

Notable examples of this phenomenon include the following:

As the great Local News Wars of the 1990s reached their glorious apex, Channel 8 of Portland (Oregon, naturally) decided to christen one of their weather maps Doppler 8000 in an attempt to convince people that they possessed a technologically superior way of forecasting precipitation in the greater Portland area (which, as any resident of that city knows, is extremely challenging, inasmuch as you don't know whether the rain will arrive before or after noontime). In response, rival Channel 6, taking a considerably more comprehensive approach, renamed itelf to Channel 6000. This change may have been confusing to some viewers, as 6000 was not a valid channel on anyone's cable box.

In 1999, as Microsoft prepared to release the successor to the Windows 98 and Windows NT 4.0 operating systems, a savvy marketer observed that neither "Windows 00" nor "Windows NT 5.0" were very inspiring names; thus was born Windows 2000. To appeal to less sophisticated users (who might be put off by the added sophistication of a 1000-level version number), Microsoft in parallel launched a dumbed-down, friendlier-but-still-futuristic-sounding version of Windows 2000 called Windows Millennium Edition (or "Windows Me"). However, Windows Me's lack of support for popular legacy hardware and software (sound familiar?) and its general inability to connect to the Internet doomed it out of the box -- why wasn't it called Windows 00? -- and it was quickly buried two years later by the widescale adoption of Windows XP.

In The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror XII, the Ultrahouse 3000 (voiced by Pierce Brosnan) pays homage to the line of homicidal computer systems that started with the HAL-9000 found in Arthur C. Clarke's signature work, 2001: A Space Odyssey. This example provides an excellent opportunity for me to mention that my refrigerator is adorned with a circular magnet fashioned after one of HAL's eyes, so that I can derive considerable pleasure from shouting "Open the door, HAL!!" whenever I want a beer.

(It's probably worth noting that my fridge has yet to respond with "I'm afraid I can't do that.")

So, marketing professionals of the world: when you're feeling uninspired about a brand name and your deadline is looming, just multiply your best idea by a few thousand and call it a day. If you need some extra oomph, try adding a random Greek letter or two. And, when in doubt, finishing everything with bunch of exclamation marks never hurts.

This summer, slow and steady will not win...
DEATH RACE 8000πΩθΔβ!!!!!

3:23am

2008-07-25T03:23:00.006-04:00

Bose makes an excellent set of earbuds shaped like jet engines that deliver premium-quality sound directly into your ear canal with the acoustics of a home theater surround system. The only problem is that the buds are constantly falling out of your ears, even if you're completely motionless. That sort of inhibits your listening experience.

Some limoncello on the rocks would be just smashing right now. Apparently it's not too hard to make.

This is indented
and italicized
text
broken up into
several lines
like a poem perhaps...
Does it sound different
in your head
when you read it?
It does for me
and the voice is softer
more ethereal
androgynous
like a stoned fifth grader
this->must_be_getting_annoying();
so I'll
STOP

Here's a stack of watermelons exploding in slow motion, set to a version of the 1812 Overture that has been transposed down a couple of keys for some reason:

Why do I still have this lava lamp from high school that I never use? Maybe I should plug it in before I go to bed. Then, when I wake up in the middle of the night bathed in purple and yellow (wasn't there some weird banana-grape chewing gum back in the 80s? I'm sure it was gross), I'll be quite confused and disoriented. Except that the sun is going to rise in a couple of hours, so that will kinda ruin the effect. Oh well, let's see what happens.

Help Me, Dr. Zaius!

2008-07-20T23:56:00.012-04:00

Well, I don't know about you, but I had a damn fine weekend, with the centerpiece being a brilliantly conceived and executed breakfast-for-dinner party, hosted at ThongCharm's Boston headquarters.

At said party, under the influence of an espresso martini that needed some serious tinkering (um, like, there needs to be SOME sort of dairy in there, no?), my good friend the Hornett and I spent a good 40 minutes or so (give or take a standard amount of exaggeration) raving extensively about the pristine, distilled comic genius contained within this clip from A Fish Called Selma, a(n) hilarious episode from the seventh season of The Simpsons:

(click to watch video)

The Hornett went so far as to theorize that the entire episode was written around a this one sketch, wrapping some semblance of a plot and other storytelling constructs around this single, juicy kernel. Regardless of whether or not that was the case (and I wouldn't be surprised if it were), I can say one thing for sure: I've had these songs stuck in my head for over a week, and I can't see them going away anytime soon.

Unless, of course, I were to subject myself voluntarily to the ∏th circle of hell (and yes, I believe that is a capital π):

(BTW, in case anyone out there is waxing nostalgic for the original Falco video, this link's for you. For all the kiddies in the audience, maybe you'd prefer this remixed version featuring The Simms.)

Speaking of iPhone Imitations

2008-07-16T23:16:00.013-04:00

Check out this incredibly cheesey infomercial for HP's TouchSmart PC, which appears to be an attempt to re-create the iPhone's user-experience gimmickery on a desktop computer:

(click to watch video)

Sure, it demos pretty well for those scenarios where you use your PC as a $1000 MP3 player or slide projector. But tell me this: what value does a touchscreen add to all of the day-to-day word-processing, email-writing, and web browsing tasks that the average person actually performs on their PC? Not much, at least not until we start to encounter software that's specifically designed for such a tactile interface.

For example, consider a software application that allows you to order tacos and fried chicken:

Or how about an application that helps you quickly and intuitively scan through other people's visions of the future:

Indeed, it would appear that the technology sector has served up yet another compelling chicken-and-egg problem... where the chicken is either fried or smothered in cheap paprika-like seasoning, and the egg is a little red ball that looks like this:

iPhone Contrarians

2008-07-16T00:20:00.006-04:00

Sometimes, a blog entry engages you at such a fundamental level that your comments in response almost end up being a blog entry of their own. (This has yet to have happened on these pages, but eh, my random babble is probably less engaging than that found elsewhere.) Also sometimes you'd rather pig out on store-brand chocolate-chip cookies than write an original blog entry.

An excellent example of this happening is my response to ThongCharm-Priya's thoughts on the iPhone and all the hype surrounding it. What can I say, stuff happens (and sometimes things as well).

For those of you too lazy to click for yourselves, here are some highlights from the review, with some words randomly highlighted in various colors for no particular reason.

i'm sorry to be the contrarian here in this frothy summer milkshake which is the july launch of the 3G ipod, the motto of which appears to be "i will stand in line in the hot sun and queue like i live in a communist country to buy this object i covet and then be forced to activate it on at&t's crappy network and i absolutely must have it now cuz it's so beautiful and oh, dare i say, iconic".

[...]

form factor: the iphone is sleek, and is neat for pictures and videos with the edgeless screen.

[...]

keyboard: the iphone's keyboard blows. i fatfingered everything and it requires constant attention. [...] i've almost successfully memorized my blackberry pearl keypad so i no longer have to look when i type, and can type with one hand, which comes in handy when i'm walking or in a car or wishing i had the other 2 arms of lakshmi, which is 80% of the time while using the phone

[...]

web browsing: the html browsing was the biggest iphone disappointment because web pages on safari were miniature and unreadable and i couldn't intuitively figure out how to make the browsing easier in any way [...] and sadly, i am way behind in my conspiracy theories and editorial news about central asia.

[...]

i also for some reason got really excited about how you could change phone options. all of a sudden that lame options tab was fun. [...] somehow i liked the icons of everything better, and that's not a real competitive advantage.

And here's my comment in response:

All of those iPhone commercials that have inundated our TVs do a fantastic job of showing all of the nifty little things that the iPhone can do, and how it makes even the most conceptually boring tasks like unlocking the phone or choosing options fun and exciting. Props to Apple marketing for that.

However, there are actually quite a few things that the iPhone can't do, and some may surprise you. Prime example: there's no cut & paste... didn't you just assume that a device as sophisticated as the iPhone would have this basic feature? Even the capacitive touchscreen (for all of its general engineering awesomeness) will not respond to stylus-like input, and therefore in spite of Apple's push to get the iPhone entrenched in corporate America through its integration with MS Exchange, you'll never be able to use an iPhone to wirelessly sign on the dotted line and close the deal in the field (and yes, this is indeed a viable use case for a mobile phone, or at least it will be soon).

The other interesting side of the iPhone hype is how all the other carriers and manufacturers are rushing to bring iPhone-like devices to market, sometimes with similar hype (Samsung Instinct, I'm looking in your direction). While this is a global phenomenon, the funny/sad part is that American carriers who want to compete with the iPhone are still bumbling around with the first wave of imitation devices (e.g. the HTC Vogue/Touch/XV6900, my new baby) while customers of their overseas counterparts are already equipped with the second round of much beefier, sexier handsets (e.g. HTC Touch Diamond). If I subscribed to a GSM-based carrier, I might be tempted to buy an unlocked phone from overseas on eBay and plug in my SIM card to (which I did successfully when I was with T-Mobile)... only there's one small problem, in that most of these devices only support UMTS/HSPA, and the only such service that you can find in the U.S. as of this writing is in a few select cities on AT&T's network... anywhere else, and you're S.O.L.

At any rate, I like the fact that the iPhone has given a solid kick in the pants to the manufacturers and carriers (especially in the U.S.) who were dragging their feet on advancing mobile technology. There's no reason that we couldn't have had visual voicemail in 1999 or touch-oriented user interfaces in 2003, but thanks to the iPhone, those are looking to become new baseline features.

BTW, the thing about the iPhone keyboard is that you have to get used to the idea that the key is actually "pressed" when it's released (which is why it displays a larger version of the key you're pressing above your finger), so if you're used to a BlackBerry, Q, or Treo, it takes some mental adjustment. I installed an imitation iPhone keyboard on my XV6900 and after a few minutes I was tapping away at a pretty rapid pace. In the end, I ended up uninstalling that keyboard (it had a nasty bug whereby all letters entered from other soft keyboards would become numbers) and using the "Touch Keyboard" that comes pre-installed... it's basically a soft version of the BlackBerry Pearl's SureType keyboard, and after a few minutes of acclimation it becomes just as fast as a full hardware QWERTY.

High School Chemistry Review

2008-07-01T22:58:00.005-04:00

BTW, in case you forgot what happens when you mix cesium with water:

The Captain's Cookbook, Part I

2008-07-01T21:56:00.014-04:00

Lately, the ThongCharm ladies have made a habit of sharing with us some of their most interesting (experimental?) recipes and other culinary undertakings. Since imitation is the highest form of flattery, and since the universe requires some sort of counterbalance to their casually chaotic, quasi-artsy approach to food (lest everything collapse in a Big Crunch), I present to you, in the most somewhat-proud of manners:

THE CAPTAIN'S COOKBOOK
Applying a Services Oriented Architecture to Culinary Design Problems

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of a Services Oriented Architecture, suffice it to mean that I shall be both agile and lazy.

Also, I hereby dub myself The Cesium Chef.

And now, for our first recipe.

Random Sweet & Spicy Chicken Meatball Lettuce Wraps
Prep time: 90 seconds
Cooking time: Whatever makes sense, but probably not too much

Ingredients:

1/2 package Costco Sweet & Sour Chicken Meatballs (if you wish, you may instead use Costco Buffalo Chicken Meatballs or Costco Teriyaki Chicken Meatballs)
1 can pineapple chunks in pineapple juice
1/2 pound baby carrots
1 bottle K.C. Masterpiece Spiced Caribbean Jerk 30-minute Marinade
1 cucumber
1 head of lettuce, of whatever type, as long as it doesn't have salmonella

Cooking Instructions:

In a fairly large skillet or saucepan, combine the bottle of marinade, half the contents of the can of pineapple (chunks + liquid), and the meatballs. Bring to a soft boil over medium heat, then cover and simmer for some arbitrary amount of time, stirring whenever the thought occurs to you.
Using whatever broke-ass knife you have, chop the baby carrots and cucumbers into various three-dimensional shapes that could fit into a sphere of volume 25π/9".
Fill each lettuce leaf with some combination of meatballs, carrots/cucumbers, and pineapple, but try not to include too much of the marinade because it's very likely that the meatballs already contain way too much sodium!!! Serve immediately.

Please note that I haven't actually sampled the results of this recipe yet, as it's still cooking. Wait. I haven't checked on the meatballs in like 37 minutes.

The 10 Most Overrated Brands

2008-06-26T23:46:00.012-04:00

A gent by the name of Lucas Conley (a name widely-known to 0.1% of the population) has a new book out called Obsessive Brand Disorder: The Illusion of Business and the Business of Illusion, in which he examines the inner workings, implications, and general insidiousness of marketing strategies that attempt to sell you on a brand name rather than on the actual qualities and benefits of a product.

You don't have to look around for long to realize how pervasive this technique is becoming in this day and age, as our attention spans dwindle and the opportunities for advertisers to reach us multiply exponentially. After all, if you don't have sufficient time or energy to research and evaluate your purchases rationally, all you're left with is a gut feeling whose genesis may have largely resulted from exposure to various sorts of black magic (e.g. brand marketing). (Think about it: who wouldn't be tempted to fill up their gas tank with a sexy iPump even if it cost them $0.50/gallon more?)

To help promote his book, Conley released to The Boston Globe a list of what he considers to be the ten most overrated brands. To save you the trouble of clicking through the whole list (and from all of the advertising entailed by this experience), I've reproduced it below:

Southwest Airlines

The Gap

Los Angeles Lakers*

Oprah

Dunkin' Donuts

Victoria's Secret

Apple

Trump

Generic Store Brands

*Okay, while the traumatic events of Game 7 of the 2000 Western Conference Finals will have me forever cursing the name of this Tinseltown team, Conley's argument that Kobe Bryant's spoiled, whiny egomania somehow translates into an over-inflated image of the team as a whole doesn't really make any sense. I suppose he could find a less transparent way to pander to his audience, but eh.

Any big surprises here? Which brands would you add to this list?

Your Choices at the Pump

2008-06-22T16:28:00.014-04:00

The incident that prompted this post happened the other day at the Natick Plaza service station on the Mass Pike eastbound.

I had just pulled up to one of two pumps at the end of the station that offer both gasoline and diesel. These pumps have two separate nozzles, one at either end, and two banks of buttons to select either one of three grades of gas (standard, plus, or premium) or diesel. The diesel pump is clearly marked with a green handle, and the overall picture looks a lot like the one at right (only with an annoying television that endlessly blares the ever-tantalizing GasStationTV as you fill your tank).

As I watched the numbers on the pump tick upward at the rate of $4.96/gallon, a middle-aged woman in an old Subaru (a typical New England sight) pulled up to the opposite face of the pump I was using. Not thirty seconds later, she made her way around the pump to ask an innocent question:

Excuse me, can I ask you a question? Which one is gas, and which one is diesel? I don't want diesel.

As I explained to her that diesel was the one with the green label and handle, and that all she needed to do was use the other one, it occurred to me that questions such as hers are only going to become more common.

Imagine that it is the year 2020, you're on an extended road trip to see your parents, and you've just pulled off the interstate into a British HesxonGulfbil station to refuel your 2011 Toyota Camry (which is one of a shrinking population of non-hybrid Toyotas still in use). What would your reaction be if the pump console looked something like this?

Yep, that's what's probably gonna happen if (as it currently appears) there's no one-size-fits-all solution to our automotive energy needs. In this case, the only solution to the usability problem is for Apple to invent the iPump, whose extremely sexy touchscreen interface with integrated passive RFID payment capabilities will make sorting through this mess both easy and fun:

Tracking Your Car's Fuel Economy in an Excel Spreadsheet Is Completely Normal

2008-06-05T01:29:00.000-04:00

As you can see, in the upper-left-hand corner is a summary of MPG metrics (including the average, median, best and worst fuel economy between fill-ups), in the upper-right is an embedded line graph of the Mystery Ship's fuel economy over time, and below that is a running log of all fuel stops that I've made since I purchased the car in December 2004:

That's about it. Nothing too special... I mean, I didn't bother to do a 3D plot fuel economy versus fill-up location over time or anything.

So, what does your spreadsheet look like?

Update (6/5/2008): If you are interested (and are completely normal like me), you can can download my spreadsheet template here to get started with your own fuel economy log.

I'm sure you'll note that there is clearly a general upward trend in fuel economy (taking into account seasonal variations in fuel composition and ambient temperature), mostly due to a recent increase in the proportion of highway driving relative to city driving (as reflected by the increase in fill-up frequency). Although some might ask whether the 2007 federally-mandated availability of ULSD fuel (which boasts a 97% reduction in sulfur content over LSD fuel, and therefore which I use exclusively) might have had an impact on these numbers, the 2007 data clearly indicate that the switch to ULSD had a negligible effect (if any) on fuel economy. Of course, you can't really see much of the 2007 data in the screenshot above, so you'll have to trust me on this one.

The Struggle Within

2008-05-31T16:18:00.007-04:00

So this message just popped up on my laptop:

(And no, I'm not running Windows Vista, which you'd think would be the only flavor of Windows that would do such a thing.)

All of this takes me back to the days when I listened to Metallica's eponymous black album. (Sidenote: my prepubescent sister reported having nightmares after listening to "Enter Sandman.") On this album is a song entitled "The Struggle Within" and it goes something like this:

Struggle within, it suits you fine
Struggle within, your ruin
Struggle within, you seal your own coffin
Struggle within, struggling within

Yes, very insightful.

Handy Business Tip: Randomly Being a Moron Will Drive Your Customers Away

2008-05-29T17:48:00.020-04:00

Today, around 3:45pm, the Captain left his suburban office with the intent of arriving back home in the city in time to get his hair cut, work out, and shower before heading out for dinner. As his Mystery Ship cruised down the Mass Pike with its sunroof fully open and his radio tuned to All Things Considered, the sunny afternoon promised a bounty of relaxation and personal-life productivity.

However, [insert here your favorite cliche or other literary device that connotes "it was not to be so" and/or generally changes the tone of the established narrative].

I arrived at Kendall Barbers at approximately 4:32pm. For those that aren't familiar with this particular shop, this is the quaint little venue with the barber pole right next to the Kendall Square Post Office in Camrbidge. (For more information, please see the overly small stock image to the right.) Recently, having decided to graduate from SuperCuts, I've alternated patronizing this shop and my girlfriend's (significantly more expensive) hair stylist, with the idea that this routine achieves some sort of optimal balance of quality, convenience and value.

Well, no sooner had I strolled into the shop when a woman working there announced to me that they were closed. This notion of "being closed" seemed a bit strange to me, since the sign outside the store indicated that they were open from 9am - 5pm, Monday through Friday, and that they were currenly OPEN. Appealing to logic, reason, and the general making-sense-ness of things, I pointed out the fact that the sign ouside said they were open until 5pm, that it was currently 4:33pm, and that (above all else) the door sign that indicated the shop's current OPEN / CLOSED status clearly stated that the shop was presently OPEN. (I could have just as easily argued -- probably quite successfully -- that the hour of 4:33pm generally occurs before 5pm, holding the current calendar date, time zone, and integrity of space-time constant -- and therefore the shop should be open regardless of its stated status, but I felt this was unnecessary.)

At any rate, the woman responded that they did not accept new customers after 4:45, as if this meant something. Now, perhaps I should have considered the fact that she could have invented a time machine over her lunch break, or that her perception of time had been adversely affected by a miniature black hole courtesy of CERN, but at the time it seemed pretty obvious to me that her argument had no merit. However, as I began to point out that it was barely past 4:30, the woman abruptly cut me off and stated simply that they were closed for the day.

Now, in my experience, when businesses post a sign that says they are open until a certain time, they will accept new customers up until that time, since the posted hours serve to inform customers as to when they are welcome much more than they serve to indicate to employees when they can go home. Additionally, if by chance a business forgets to shut its doors and change its OPEN sign to CLOSED when its employees no longer want new customers, they should at least be courteous enough to honor the requests of an unsuspecting customer who happens to wander in and actually expect to receive a service in exchange for monetary considerations. And, finally, regardless of whatever misunderstandings may arise, there's never any reason to respond to a customer's honest inquiries by snapping at them.

So, given today's events, and the fact that this shop really doesn't offer any value-added over the likes of SuperCuts and the other big chains, I see no reason to go back again. Is this an irrational reaction to the trivial act of one employee (who was likely just having a bad day)? Most likely... but what's driving me to abandon this shop is not so much this one act itself, but rather the degree to which the act had to contradict objective reality and notions of common courtesy in order to achieve whatever end the woman had in mind. Among the hundreds of other possible easier courses of action, why choose the one that's least professional, least congenial, and least good for you and your employer in the long run? Is a mere 10-15 minutes of additional work and pretending to be nice to someone really that horrible of an alternative? And if it is, what's wrong with giving a quick and simple explanation that doesn't directly contradict established facts or insult anyone's intelligence?

Eh, whatever. Let's just call it an arbitrary decision on both of our parts and move on.

Some Reasons Why Bunnies Are Funny (Honey)

2008-05-17T23:10:00.007-04:00

I like rabbits for a variety of reasons. They're usually quite skittish little creatures, which makes sense given that they've been hunted by a multitide of predators for thousands of years. However, if you're one of the kind, eccentric souls that adopts one as a pet, you'll discover that, over a period of a few years, they tend to mellow out a bit, sometimes to an unnerving degree:

If you feed them sweet things (such as papaya), they will often reward you with a random happy-dance or two:

In addition, rabbit jumping is, apparently for some, a professional sport:

And, if you're ever in doubt, just throw a chicken into the fray:

But if you ask me, the #1 source of rabbit-derived amusement is to just watch them hop around aimlessly, stopping at random intervals to do nothing at all, only to resume the hopping in a completely different direction some time later:

Ah, if only my girlfriend weren't allergic to the little buggers, my living room might look like this:

In the end, I may have to compromise and settle for an outdoor rabbit:

Today's Random Depictions of Jesus

2008-05-12T23:33:00.011-04:00

Admit it. Somewhere, in the stale recesses of your mind, you knew all along that Jesus of Nazareth packed one hell of a hadouken:

Maybe you didn't know that Jesus was also very skilled in the art of the short sword, but that shouldn't surprise anyone who's familiar with this t-shirt:

Okay, so you didn't play Dungeons and Dragons as a kid. Neither did I, so I found this one more interesting:

No? Hmmm... okay, how about:

This one even has a backstory:

The Attack of the 500-foot Jesus will begin on a Tuesday, not far from the Independence, Missouri bus stop you normally pass on your way to work. At approximately six seconds past six minutes past six hours into the day (that's 06:06:06, derived from the number of the beast), 500-foot Jesus will rise from the depths of a nearby underground train station, cracking the ground as He rises up. He will carry two train carriages all the way to downtown Kansas City; the carraiges[sic] which will then be thrown into the two tallest buildings in the vicinity.

So there you go.

The Fallacy of Measuring the Price of Oil with Numbers

2008-05-07T20:03:00.017-04:00

We humans seem to have a thing for numerical milestones. Each year that a person spends on this planet warrants a celebration, especially if it's their 1st, 16th, 21st, 30th, (40th?) or 100th birthday. In 1976, the U.S. Treasury was so eager to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the day the Second Continental Congress told the Brits to go wank off with a moldy crumpet that they minted a special quarter (many of which I used to buy large quantities of SweetTarts, sometimes in conjunction with a $2 bill). And, earlier this year, a collective gasp was heard from sea to shining sea as the price of crude oil topped $100/barrel.

Now, apart from the related bigger-picture issues -- e.g., the fact that $100/barrel oil indicates that our energy policy / priorities are out of whack, that the dollar is falling, etc. -- there really isn't any reason why this event is newsworthy per se. Think about it: if we had a base-16 counting system, that ominous $100/barrel mark would instead be a relatively unimportant-looking $64/barrel, and we'd be waiting until oil hit two hundred fifty-six decimal dollars before stopping the presses and sounding the panic alarms.

The interesting part is that, in spite of our affinity for base-10 and milestones that are multiples of 5 or 10, now that we're past $100/barrel, the media are not waiting around until it hits $200 or even $150 before once again going shock-and-awe with the doom-and-gloom. Indeed, it seems like every day, your morning newspaper(.com)'s front page blares something to the effect of:

CRUDE OIL PASSES $102/BARREL

OIL TOPS OUT AT A RECORD $104.36/BARREL!!

SKYROCKETING OIL PRICES SURPASS $107/BARREL!!! OH NO!!!

These headlines are especially bizarre given the fact that, unless we as a species can collectively kick the oil habit (and given the rate of growth in the developing world, that's not going to be anytime soon), the price of oil is always going to go up over time. That is to say that, in terms of their efficacy in conveying useful information about the state of the world, these headlines are functionally equivalent to this one:

TIME SETS ANOTHER RECORD FOR THE NUMBER OF SECONDS THAT HAVE ELAPSED SINCE THE BEGINNING OF THE UNIVERSE

In a couple of years, our current per-barrel price of $124 (or $7C hex), will seem like a steal. Even now, as Americans complain about paying $3.50/gallon for gas at the pump (or, in the case of the Captain's diesel-powered Indigo Mystery Ship, $4.50/gallon), much of the rest of the world (including our friends across the Atlantic who pay $9/gallon) has erupted into fits of melancholy laughter.

So, rather than wasting our energy (actual and metaphorical) lamenting the fact that oil has entered the realm of triple-digits (at least in base-10) -- and will likely stay there forever more -- how about if we instead focus on finding more innovative, affordable, and scalable ways to power our cars, planes, and 60" plasma TVs? And hey, if the numbers still make you nervous, just fire up calc.exe and switch it to Hex mode. You'll feel better.

Stuff You Think About When You Don't Sleep Enough

2008-05-05T21:18:00.007-04:00

Whenever you play an especially memorable movie character, you are forevermore chained to that character's identity. Lawrence Fishburne will always be Morpheus. Hugo Weaving will always be Agent Smith. In the immortal words of my friend the Hornett:


"Welcome to Rivendell...	... Mr. Anderson."

I was therefore very disappointed when I saw 21 this past weekend and witnessed Lawrence Fishburne beat the hell out of Jim Sturgess without making him choose between the red pill and the blue pill.

When milk is in short supply, or you find yourself in such an environment where milk will quickly spoil (i.e. there is no refrigerator), you can still make decent espresso drinks with Swiss Miss... but you'll still need an espresso machine.

I have no idea how to throw a football. For most American-born-and-raised males of the species, this skill is second nature. Unfortunately for me, I can't help myself from trying to throw it like a baseball, usually with disastrous results for the would-be receiver.

Sometimes you just want to pole-vault over a sleeping elephant.

The sounds and gestures that baseball umpires make to indicate a strikeout used to be so much funnier. Will there ever be a revival? One can only hope. Until then, I guess this will have to do.

I Am a Valued Verizon FiOS Customer

2008-05-01T21:05:00.013-04:00

The Captain just received a dose of classic corporate customer-service awesomeness from Verizon's FiOS Division.

My roommate and I have had FiOS in our apartment for the past year and a half. Over this period of time, we've logged several tech support issues (probably around 5 or 6) relating to our ActionTec MI424WR router (the standard router that Verizon gives you when you become a FiOS customer). Issues included:

Intermittently, the router would start dropping all wireless packets, in spite of 100% signal strength and the fact that wired LAN packets continued to flow at full-speed. Restarting the router always fixed the issue, if only for a few minutes.

Intermittently, the ethernet ports would go dead. Restarting the router sometimes fixed this, other times it did not.

Intermittently, it would be impossible to login to the router's configuration utility, as it would reject our [correctly-entered] username and password. Restarting the router would fix this issue.

Since these issues were intermittent in nature (as you may have gathered), the tech always found a way to cite "wireless interference during certain hours" or "faulty wiring in our [3-year-old] apartment" as a reason for not actually attempting to solve our problem. Whenever we asked the tech to replace the router, they denied that Verizon had ever given us one (?!), and then went on to recommend that we go to our loal electronics store to get a new one.

A few months ago, the router flat-out died, so we plugged in a random linksys as a replacement and moved on with our lives.

Fast-forward to today, when I checked the mail and discovered that Verizon has sent us a small package for some reason. Inside was an A/C power adapter for the ActionTec router, along with a letter that says [emphasis theirs]:

Dear FiOS Customer,

At Verizon, we are committed to delivering the future of the Internet to you today. To achieve that goal, we continually monitor and test our products, searching for ways to improve them. We have recently improved the life expectancy of your FiOS router power adapter and are excited to share this enhancement with you.

Please replace your current router power adapter with the enclosed enhanced power adapter. This new power adapter is provided to you at no additional charge. We want to ensure you continue to enjoy the benefits of our fiber-optic network, delivering the full potential of the Internet with mind-boggling speed and TV with 100% digital picture. [Editor's side-note: it's really unsatisfying to watch 87% digital TV.]

Please follow the simple steps in the instructions sheet* to replace your router power adapter.

Important: This power adapter is compatible only with Verizon-provided FiOS routers with Model Number MI424WR.

Sincerely,

James Kilroy
Director, FiOS Product Management

* In case you're wondering, the attached "instructions sheet" really does just tell you to unplug the old power adapter, and plug in the new one. Of course, nowhere does it tell you how to verify that you do indeed have Model Number MI424WR.

All of this very interesting for a couple of reasons:

1. After we repeatedly asked Verizon for a new router, and after Verizon repeatedly told us that they never actually gaven us a router in the first place, here we find ourselves presented with a power supply for a router that doesn't officially exist.

2. Translation of the term enhanced power adapter: "a power adapter that is actually compatible with the electronics that it is powering, unlike the previous model, which was widely reported and known to fry the router within a year or so"

So, Mr. Kilroy, although I do appreciate the free power adapter for a router that was not electronically sound and and never 100% functional (and which you may or may not have ever actually given me), I think you and your cohorts at Verizon could make better use of your time if you made a concerted, organized effort to get your marketing, engineering, and technical support staff all on the same page, and invested more in the overall up-front quality of your product than sending your customers an ex post facto half-fix transparently sugar-coated with vacuous marketing blather.

An Explanation of Everything

2008-04-29T22:49:00.016-04:00

I suppose it's customary for a newcomer to the blog o'sphere to begin by introducing themself, providing some sort of explanation as to the title of their blog and/or its motives, and in some cases unveiling a sweeping manifesto that Declares Something Big*. Although some may opt to put this task off until an unspecified later date, that is not my intention here, so let us begin, shall we?

* private unsigned long lHugeNumber;

So, um... Captain BS?

Indeed, this is the alter-ego of mine that will inhabit these pages. The name was actually bestowed upon me a long time ago by my 8th grade science teacher. Back then, the nascent Internet was just beginning to crawl out into the daylight, and the hipster-geek who was Mr. B found himself smitten. For him, there was no greater joy than coupling with the terminal program on his Mac II to write poetry like the following:


psu% telnet wisconsin.edu
Connecting to wisconsin.edu...

wisconsin% telnet nebraska.edu
Connecting to nebraska.edu...

nebraska%

And so on. I spent many a lunch hour (the daily meeting of the school's informal science club) watching him do this.

One day, Mr. B decided that he would rather spend his afternoons telnetting around from place to place than teaching spring semester physical science, and he informed our class thusly: "Ladies and gentlemen, I have exciting news -- we're going to Mars!" [ineffectual pause for effect] "Rather than slogging through the textbook chapter by chapter, this semester we're going to take an imaginary trip to Mars, during which we will explore the red planet's history, geology, and relationship with our planet Earth.

"I will appoint one of you as the captain (and I think I have a pretty good idea who it will be " [he sent me a wink, as if to dispel any lingering doubt about my uber-teacher's-pet status] ") and he will -- err, he OR SHE!! " [damn that Title IX] " -- he or she will be responsible for steering the ship and leading us through our voyage."

A day later, the Captain had been identified and introduced.

"There really isn't that much you have to do," he explained to me at lunch one day. "Just break them up into groups... Have one group do some research at the library, maybe another can simulate our journey in a HyperCard stack" [riiiight... HyperCard...] " and don't forget we have some stuff about Mars on LaserDisc!"

Um.

"Hey, don't worry about it. If you run into trouble, just make something up... hey, with your initials, maybe I could call you Captain B.S.!!"

And that was that.

Charming, but what's your blog going to be about?

An excellent question, and one without a definitive answer.

Okay, so essentially you're making one of those blogs about nothing that just takes up space on one of Google's servers?

Well, I can't completely deny the charge, but it may be the case that, over time, various patterns and topical trends will bubble up through the electron-fabric of this here blog. For example:

There will be geekery. Yes, that's why at the beginning of this entry I made a ha-ha using a footnote that declared a 64-bit integer in C++/C#/Java/probably 300 other languages. Yes, I am writing all of the HTML code for this blog by hand. (Okay, no I'm not.) Yes, I work for a Boston-area software startup. However, when it's all said and done, this is not a joy-of-being-a-software-geek blog, as I also like to get my geek on in ways that do not involve 1's and 0's. Some of these are covered in some of the bullets that follow.

We learn interesting things about the world sometimes, and these things will be shared. As is the blogging norm, on many occasions I will include my personal observations and analysis of said interesting things, with the hope that you, faithful reader(s), will add yours.

Some things are intrinsically funny, and they will be listed. Aimlessly-hopping bunny rabbits. Action-figure Jesuses. Things with an excessive number of heads, arms, and/or internal organs. Speaking of which: pancreases. Upside-down flying cows that shoot tomahawk missiles. Non-euclidian spaces. Anything that comes out of my Random Bad Romance Novel Generator. And so forth.

There will be random references to and retellings of various scattered memories from my childhood. This is where I regale you with stories about how I could not be beaten at Four Square if "Hanging' Tough" was playing on the radio, attempt to convince you that The Neverending Story is the best movie ever made, ponder the reasons why I threw a giant sheet of foam out of a school bus heading down I-5 on the way to soccer practice, and reveal a startling command of Final Fantasy damage physics.

Every now and then, there will be appearances of purported "creative writing." Growing up, I spent most of my time convinced that I would be a fiction writer of some sort, but after the first book I tried to write was rejected by the publishing houses (shocking, considering it was an unsolicited manuscript from a 6th grader that had no plot whatsoever) and my more concerted effort at producing an all-encompassing parody of adolescence stalled out on Chapter 3, I've resigned myself to live vicariously through my 39,291,039.2 aspiring-author friends instead. Nevertheless, you'll occasionally see random short works of fiction from me on these pages, but I offer absolutely no warranty as to their quality or ability to amuse you in any way -- most of the time, I'm just trying to amuse myself. Example: this Christmas Pageant that I wrote, probably while overcaffeinated.

Black holes, time travel, parallel universes, and other stuff mentioned in A Brief History of Time will show up on occasion. I dunno, I have a strange fascination with the stuff. This explains why I'm captivated by Lost (if you ask me, the smoke monster is totally a roving, sentient disturbance in the fabric of space-time), and why I waited an extra 20 minutes to leave for work today because I was watching this guy explain String Theory in terms of everyday things like traffic lights and ants.

So yeah.

Huh. Okay then, well, I guess I'll just let you do your thing!

Much obliged.

Setting Sail

2008-04-29T02:56:00.001-04:00

Tuesday, April 29, 2008, 2:56am.

It's too late to start a blog, but I did anyway.