October 28, 2002

Delicious

Did you know that on average everybody swallows eight spiders a year while they sleep?

09:46 PM part of a balanced breakfast

October 21, 2002

Whippersnappers

I think I am getting old. I see all these high school kids with letterman jackets and nice cars and I think to myself young punks, which is the generational equivalent of whippersnappers.

My wife and I were going to church one day (and by church I mean Wal-Mart) and we were waiting for a woman to back out of a parking space when these three teenage guys pulled right up and acting like they were going to cut us off and take the space. Their windows were down and I could hear them joking around about cutting us off. My wife and I yelled at them in some primitive language and they drove off laughing. We parked and walked inside, where we stopped to talk to a local newspaper salesguy (it is cheaper to get all week than to just get Sunday. Why? Because we also own the recycling company).

So I'm sitting there waiting right inside the automatic door and the three teenagers are walking from across the parking lot and they see me. We have a few dozen seconds of all of us acting like we aren't looking at each other and then they walk through the door. I look up and see that they are scared out of their minds, which suprises me.

From their point of view they think that I have been waiting for them right inside the door, and for some reason they think that I am a threat. This is hilarious to me. I have only been in one fight (6th grade) and am horribly out of shape. I suppose there is an advantage to being 250 pounds, even if at least 30 of that is pure fried chicken. As they pass by I tried to not laugh at the young punks that haven't seen enough of the world to know that I am not who they should be worried about.

09:09 PM part of personal

Money, money, money

Money, money, money. Poverty really is a cycle, and I am just now beginning to really know it. I read a lot and reading in a way is simply a shortcut to knowledge not wisdom - you learn about things outside of your experience but sometimes you are forced to really learn later on. Parental advice is like this too. No matter how many times my parents give me simple advice I only really learn after getting burnt by making a wrong move. Reading is expanding, don't get me wrong, but at the end of the day you have to live a life you are proud of instead of reading about one. Maybe someday I will really know that.

07:43 PM part of personal

October 19, 2002

Superstore

While driving today I saw a truck with 3 bumper stickers. The first was for a local christian radio station, the second was a Jesus fish and the third was a confederate flag next to the words: The South was Right. I'm guessing that they bought these at different stores since Racist Christian bookstore went out of business. But then again, I could be prejudging this person just like I think they are prejudging - they could be talking about something else such as: The South was Right......about Shoney's being delicious.

12:44 AM part of a balanced breakfast

Barista

Coding for fun and profit.

#!/d/perl/bin/perl.exe
# (void*)
# If I ever own a cafe it will be called
# 0xBADDECAF or just 0xCAFE, but what else could it be?

while (<>) {
   my @words = split;
   foreach my $word (@words) {
      next if $word =~ /[^a-fA-F]/;
      next if $seen{$word};
      $seen{$word} = 1;
   }
}
foreach my $word (sort (keys %seen)) {
   print $word, " ";
}


Administrator@6LFCB11 ~/code/perl
$ hexword books/bibleKJV.txt books/dictionary96.txt books/warAndPeace.txt
A AB Abbe Abda Add Added B BE Baca Bad Be C D De Dead Ebed F Feed a ab abaca abb
e accede ace ad add added b babe bad bade be bead bed bee beef c cab cd ce cf d
da daff de dead deaf deed e ebb efface f facade face faced fade faded fed fee fe
ed


That's it? Hmmm. Faded beef cafe? Feed da dead cafe? I guess I should just face da dead beef, I will never own a cafe.

12:13 AM part of a balanced breakfast

October 18, 2002

Historyless

The computer/technology industry to me has moved so fast it has lost touch with its history and culture. Everywhere I look I see programmers who have no real sense of the rich history of programming, who have no knowledge of the basic theory of what they are working on, who have no knowledge of what other people are doing in their field. There a millions of webpages marked up by people who do not know the lessons of SGML and do not understand the basic idea of the web.

The technology sector is like a fast growing company unable to spread its culture to the new employees. Computer programming has a rich culture, but it is constantly being redefined by new waves of hackers who add to the rich history without even realizing it. Go read this if you are a programmer or administrator.

Over and over past problems are resolved with great pride. Perhaps this ignorance of history is a needed ingredient in a field filled with innocent young people looking to make their mark. Each new wave thinks that technology history begins with them; that {Java, C#, Python, Ruby} is the language that will change everything about programming.

All this is sort of suprising given the number of people that I know who are so immersed in technology that they are living completely in a world with no knowledge of its past. Go read slashdot and you will hear from a million young people who are so involved with tech that they say things like "Kids should be taught open source in elementary school" and "Satellite radio and weblogs are going to change the way everyone on the entire planet views their world forever". Fine, if you are going to waste your life only caring about technology at least know about it fully.

06:14 PM part of tech

October 17, 2002

Freak show

Absolutely crazy people are ruling the world. Speaking of crazy people, do you think this is the world's funniest joke?

Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his cellphone and calls the emergency services. He gasps: "My friend is dead! What can I do?" The operator says: "Calm down, I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead."

There is a silence, then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says: "OK, now what?"

How about this:

What do you get when you cross an agnostic with a dyslexic? Someone who lies awake all night wondering if there's a dog.

06:26 PM part of a balanced breakfast

Babel

Fun for the whole family:

How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

How much wood, in a position to play of marmot of America he, if marmot of America that a wood could play?

05:42 PM part of a balanced breakfast

October 16, 2002

Here on Gilligan's Isle

I used to be a big fan of Gilligan's Island; it came on every afternoon and my sister and I would watch it together. A couple of years ago I saw the movie where they are actually rescued and now everytime I think of Gilligan's Island the memory is of that instead of the normal setting on the island. I have lost the ability to see that gang still stranded.

I wandered around some of my old stomping grounds this weekend in my hometown and then where I went to college, and things have changed like they always do. All the people I knew are gone and there are small but important changes in structure - my favorite Mexican restaurant has closed and the building has been demolished, they added to the stadium, those new dorms are coming along.

About halfway through driving around I just turned around and drove home; I didn't want my memory to be tainted anymore. I want to be able to close my eyes and imagine myself back on the island.

06:59 PM part of personal

Home

It is so strange to go home sometimes. I see my parents every few months, but they are different everytime I see them; my dad seemed a lot older this time, and it is hard to deal with. I am 23 and it is hard to have to care for my father when it comes to basic things - he can be so childlike when it comes to simple self-preservation. He can't relax; the entire time I was there he was worried about getting his taxes done (got an extension) and work, and he was berating himself for having messed all of these things up. It got me thinking - I can't remember a time when my dad wasn't very worried about his job. I don't know which is harder, seeing his body wither away or realizing that he is flawed in other ways and always has been.

06:54 PM part of personal

October 11, 2002

The South

That phrase evokes different images for different people. Having spent my entire life in the south this is home to me, but over the last few years I have considered moving away. As a technology worker who through the web is aware of the opportunities in other parts of the country, I have at times felt that the south is behind the times and that I could move to another place that is more modern in terms of race relations, technology, education, and simply overall economic development.

In much the same way as Miami and New York are the benchmarks of how Hispanics (please excuse the term) will get along in mainstream America, black/white relations over the next generations will be determined in the south. The painful history of racism, war, and death which are washed over in other parts of America are clearly visible and even celebrated (and certainly debated) here. Living in the educated middle class here you have a sense of generations; you meet people who could live in very 'liberal' 'modern' places such as San Francisco and be comfortable, and you also deal with people who seem like they are from another time (anywhere from 1865 to 1960).

Being educated and living in the south offers a perspective that I would miss if I were to move.

For example, when I was in college I lived in a nice apartment complex near the edge of a rather small college town. Over the course of the year that I lived there I learned that this side of town used to be an old mill community named Princeton - this was further evidenced by the small rural church by the same name, a series of run-down shutgun-style houses and very large plantation home overlooking a dried-up factory below it on the river.

Our apartment backed up to the highway and there was only one residence that wasn't college apartments on the street. There was one black family that has lived there for generations as seen by the way the house is built into sections like my grandmothers house was. There is one main room on the house that had a custom aluminum roof, and other rooms were built off of it as the family expanded. The carpentry, plumbing and construction is done by the family piece-by-piece. The family did not have a car, a washer or dryer, or any money. On the other side of the interstate the road continues and there are dozens of families like them; their grandfathers or fathers worked at that mill and went to that church. Generations before that they were sharecroppers working that same land, and before that they were slaves.

The contrast was striking: on one side of the road a bitterly poor family with generations of no education, on the other college students with apartments and cars.

There are too many reminders like this in the South for you to ignore issues like affirmative action, class conflict, and oppression. Many see all the confederate flags, civil war fanaticism, black pride parades, and calls for reparations as reminders of a history that America should just forget; I see all these are strong influences that keep us debating, keep us trying to work out a future in which historical oppression doesn't mean that your family is doomed to a life that you don't want for them.

And this is why I will live my entire life here.

11:59 PM part of personal

Sick Day

Every once in awhile everybody needs to take a sick day from work. You aren't sick, but you will be soon if you don't take a sick day. You need to come up with a good reason you are not at work. Some suggestions:

1. I broke my leg (hard to pull off when you walk into work the next day).


2. I broke somebody else's leg (very effective).


3. I saw my doctor and he said that I have congenital idontgiveafuckus, and that it might be contagious.


4. My cubicle is flooded, so I can't get to my computer.


5. I was driving to work today and I ran into a telephone pole. Then I realized that I hate you, so I'm not coming in today.


6. I worked 16 hours yesterday while you were at lunch, so I'm even, bitch.


7. My doctor said that my Blood-Bullshit level was high and that I should stay away from you for two days.


8. Um.. yesterday I farted hard in my cubicle and it hasn't worn off yet.


9. Frank was looking at me funny, so I killed him and am on the run from the cops today. (much more effective if Frank isn't at work that day)


10. In a crazed fit I pulled the toner cartridge out of the printer and poured it all over my body. Just wanted to let you know.


11. I forgot where the office is since I am a brilliant genius (as opposed to a stupid genius). Could you give me directions from Las Vegas?

The most effective excuse is:

I have food poisoning (mention a coworker's favorite restaurant or the company's cafeteria).

because they don't want you there today but it explains why you can be there tomorrow. Once you have made the call, you should make sure to maximize the day so that you enjoy it. Some suggestions on how to heal yourself on your day off assuming you used the food poisoning excuse:

1. Realize that you are not at work. Think about how much you needed a break from work. Think about your desk at work and how stressful it is. Now scratch yourself and yell your favorite curse-word at an 'above a whisper' level. Enjoy the fact that you can't do this at work. Do other things you can't do at work, like look out the window or throw water ballons at people's faces.
2. Make a cubicle-like fort out of pillows and cushions. Make yourself a little desk out of an old card table. Now urinate all over your cubicle, imagining that it is yours. Now go buy a new couch.
3. Go into work and play 'ninja assasin'. This is when you drive to work and try to sneak into work sight unseen in order to release your vengeance upon an ignorant victim by pulling out one of their nose hairs. Try to do this without being detected.
4. Perform 'Operation Get your company on the 6 o'clock news'. In this game that is fun for the whole family you sneak into work and place large amounts of methamphetamines (use Frosted Flakes if you can't get any of the good stuff) in one pot of coffee and sleeping pills in the other.
5. Drive to work and take a dump in the bushes outside your bosses office. Place a fan outside pointed at his window.
6. If your company is on the ground floor and people have windows, stand outside your favorite workers window and point at them until they see you. Now run away screaming like a little girl.
7. Don't get dressed today - and I mean don't get dressed. Then when you spill ketchup and yourself you can just take a shower.
8. Watch all the shows on TV that you normally can't thanks to the joys of capitalism. Throw stuff at the TV if you don't like what is going on and talk to the people on the TV like they are in the room but are having trouble hearing you (SCREW YOU REGIS, THAT WAS A GOOD MOVIE! (or change the channel, whatever floats YOUR boat)).
   
9. Get your roomate to fetch you strange things. Tell him/her to go get you some yogurt for your eyebrows, the biggest cherry she can find, an icepack full of frozen dark chocolates, and that latest edition of Cat Fancy
   This week's issue:
   
   
   
   • Furballs: is science nearing a cure?
     
   • Is licking ourselves in public ok?
     
   • "He was petting me the wrong way": one brave woman's tale of survival.
     
   
   
10. Dream about what you will do with all of the money you get from the ensuing lawsuit against the company cafeteria
    
    
    
    • Retire young and have massive plastic surgery so that you are attractive.
      
    • Escalator that can fold up into a water slide.
      
    • A monkey that is trained to be sarcastic all the time ("Oh wonderful, another banana")
      
    • Train a pack of lions to play football against each other.
      
    
    
11. If you have taken the injury excuse approach you need to think up how you got hurt:
    
    
    
    • a crazed fan tried to hug me and I lost my balance and fell down some stairs.
    
    
    • a vengance-seeking ninja attacked me on my way to work (me likey ninjas). Unable to fend him off with one hand and still maintain my pop-tart eating, I was forced to lunge at him and caused us both to tumble down the stairs. At the bottom of the stairs the fight continued with me now injured and unable to stand normally. I was poised in the Karate Kid stance on my good leg while he tried to attack me using Myojinsoga-style traditional swordsmanship on the front lawn of my apartment complex. I was able to knock him out with a single kick between the eyes and then humiliate him by applying my lipstick onto his bruised face, thus forcing him into a life of ninja shame and ninja misery.
    
    
    • The elevator was broken, so I decided to take the stairs and for fun I tried to walk up them on my hands.
    
    
    • Just tell your co-workers that some girl was talking smack about you at the club and Lynly78 don't allow no young punks to talk junk about her and that you had to throw down. Word is bond. Lyn-to-the-el-to-da-why gots to represent the M-town in the A-town.
    
    
    • The coke machine at work took my change so I went crazy-mad-flex on it with my leg. (Point to hurt leg).
    
    
    • If anybody asks how it happens just say: "I asked somebody how they sprained their ankle." Stare at them with your arms outstreched until they leave.
    
    
    
    

Enjoy.

09:10 PM part of a balanced breakfast

Everybody dance

We have an intercom at work, so every few minutes I hear:

Judy, dial 401
Judy, dial 401

with the exact same emphasis each time:

JUDY, dial 401
Judy, dial 4 - 0 - 1

which is a direct command, and everybody here is trained after a few weeks to just obey it. Maybe I should get on the horn:

JUDY, dance like a monkey
Judy, dance like a MON - KEY

08:16 PM part of a balanced breakfast

October 09, 2002

Chilling

It is really cold today, and it is raining. This feels like a completely different place. I stepped out to go to my car today and I was taken back to my first quarter of college. It was almost midnight and I was working on a paper. It was freezing outside and, as it tended to do that year, it was raining. It rained all year when I was a freshman - it was the first year of a stronge el nino and being in the direct path of the jet stream doesn't help either. Now everytime it is raining and cold I am once again a freshman, riding my bike in the rain at midnight trying to find a place to print out my first english paper.

My wife is a supporter of the growing perfuming and lotion industry. She has quite a collection in a very large drawer under our sink (it has to be forklifted in when we move from place to place). She has lotions dating back years, and she switches what she wears every once in awhile. Yesterday she switched to a scent that she used to wear when we were first dating in high school; it made me feel warm and vulnerable at the same time. My mind was replaying whatever I was feeling at that time at a level too low for me to even understand, but I still felt it.

All I seem to remember is emotions. My memories from childhood are of when I was really mad or really unhappy, not of what my old house used to be like. I only remember the details of my old house when they are important to those emotional times; I used to climb that tree, that is where I hurt my foot, those neighbors hate it when I jump off of their blue boat through the bushes into our yard.

04:37 AM part of personal

October 08, 2002

Flying bots

I just read an article in Discover about unmanned planes including the Global Hawk, an unmanned surveillance plane that flies itself including landing and taking off. Included in its specs are the ability to scan Indiana in 24 hours down to the level of detail where you can see individual people. The article also mentions the fact that they load the mission plan and then just sit there and watch the code scroll by and can step in at any time and change the mission or redirect the plane (which doesn't seem to ever be needed).

There was also a small but important aside in which they said that the commercial autopilot feature includes the ability to land with zero forward visibility (heavy snow) and that occasionally a pilot who is tired will just have the autopilot land the plane since it is better at landing. They also discussed the future of flight in which the 70 percent of flights that are caused by human error are eliminated and the planes fly themselves. Autopilots can only handle situations that they were programmed to handle, and humans pilots might exist solely to improvise when a very, very serious emergency occurs.

This is something that I have spent a good deal of time thinking about. When I step onto an elevator, drive my car, use my computer, turn on the oven, and a million other little things each day, I am trusting my life to somebody that I do not know who has statistically designed something. It seems that there is simply no stopping this trend, more technology that was designed with a simple preventative business mentality will exist in my everday life. By preventative business mentatility I mean that technology is designed to fulfill a purpose while minimizing the risk that the business can tolerate. For example, computers, TVs, and microwaves were designed and tested by businesses that could not afford long-term tests to see if they caused cancer. The advantages of TVs, etc. were determined to outweigh any of these concerns. In the movie "Fight Club" Edward Norton's character works for a major auto-maker. He says that he investigates accidents and decides if the company will issue a recall, and that the algorithm to do this is simply if the business will lose more money by issuing the recall they don't do it.

As a developer of software perhaps my view of technical professionalism and "perfection" is completely off base. Perhaps spending hours watching code fail and reading up on the overall lack of robustness in the field, I have a skewed view of the reliability of critical systems. I hope so.

06:54 PM part of tech

Extrapolation

I don't know how well you can see this, but this is a map of what word people use to ask for a soda/coke/soft drink. Just in case it is too small, blue is "soda", green is "pop", red is "coke", and purple is "other". How do they do these studies? I took Intro to Linguistics from a woman who as her master's thesis had exactly duplicated a similar study (with many more words and phrases) that was done in the South 30 years ago. She went to the same towns and found people who were representative of the people studied earlier (according to socio-economic class, etc.). It took her years. Simply amazing, in that the amount of legwork done will always fail to find the true complexity of language that really exists.

06:27 PM part of a balanced breakfast

Coffee distributor

This morning I arrived to work to find that my coffee-ring project had been sabotaged. Everyday I get about one-and-a-half cups of coffee and put them in this Nissan stainless steel flask (no airbags included) from which I dispense coffee throughout the day to a small blue mug. I drink different amounts of coffee each day, rarely drinking a full one-and-a-half cups. Everyday I let the coffee sit in the blue mug and flask and then throw it out the next day by transferring the coffee back into the flask and then refilling it there. When the coffee sits in the blue mug overnight it leaves small rings of dried coffee around the edge of the mug. My first few months of doing this through sheer laziness I found that the patterns this forms are quite pretty and that it makes the coffee taste better each day (it gives it a nice burnt taste). For the last three days I have been trying to form a cool pattern intentionally.

This morning during the blue-mug-to-flask transfer I happened to look down into the flask before emptying it. I saw what looked to be a large bit of dried coffee floating on top. It turned out to be a very large roach that had somehow wandered into the blue mug overnight and drowned. I had to clean out everything and the coffee rings are now reset.

I am guessing that drowning in anything is not fun, especially a small pool that you can't climb out of, but didn't the roach by definition drink some of the coffee right before he died? He looked a little fat when I threw him out, and given his size it looke like the equivalent of me drinking about a gallon of coffee. If he did he was probably too high on life to care about breathing. I threw him outside and the ants out there will probably eat him and absorb some of this very stronge coffee as well - I hope they don't get really psyched and bring my car back to their nest or something.

That's me - distributing coffee down the food chain.

05:34 PM part of personal

October 07, 2002

Enlightened times

This is easily the greatest webpage on the face of the earth. I have slowly realized in my own life as I grow older that I am not at all in touch with what I want to do during those 5 minute intervals, or more importantly the 8 hour intervals everyday.

11:02 PM part of inspiration

Cubicle walls

I hate cubicles. The two basic things that a computer programmer needs are quiet and the ability to create a creative environment for themselves (put up posters, listen to music, code with no pants on). The cubicle destroys both of these things by creating an environment where noise seems to be amplified, thus leading to massive distractions. I am bothered all the time by what is going on around me; interaction is fine but only when I have some control over it.

Sitting in a cubicle you can only do so much to make it feel like a place for you to be creative. Your eyes don't have a place to rest that isn't within two feet of your nose; you are basically sitting in a box in a row of boxes. How am I supposed to create here? My only source of diversity is the web; it seems like I go there everyday simply to change the view a little. A place I used to work redecorated so that all the walls, floors, and carpets had this modern colorful appearance. That is great, but I don't work in the hall, I work in the grey box at the end of the hall under the heat lamp.

The other thing that bothers me about cubicles is that they don't even meet their original goal. Cubicles arose as an efficient use of office space; it is simply cheaper to use a cubicle than to build walls. Or so it seems. Large companies use cubicles because it saves them thousands of dollars when they build the infrastructure, and they figure that it has saved them money overall. This is wrong; I easily lose about an hour's work everyday by the noise that being in a cubicle, not an office, allows me to hear. Given that this happens to most people cubicles simply aren't cheaper - you pay everyday for choosing to build cubicles.

09:28 PM part of work

October 03, 2002

Interconnectedness

People say that the power of the web is that we can now communicate more efficiently, and that we can now archive information easily. At some level the real power lies in the fact that people from other nations and political situations can express their views to foreigners. This morning alone I have read the comments of an Iranian, a German, a conspiracy-theory supporting American, and a foreign newspaper about the upcoming situation with Iraq and the U.S. This breaking down of political walls is interesting because people in other countries not only express their self-interests, but their view of history is different from the American view and they are outside of American political marketing and can thus offer a fresh perspective. Here to keeping the web open.

05:13 PM part of tech

October 02, 2002

Exploding whales

No matter how smart people are individually, they act a little different in groups.

03:17 AM part of a balanced breakfast

Root

Very interesting short story that seems to capture in fictional form what science's current goals are. The standard metaphor of the body as a computer I think is leading people to a search of our biological APIs like this novella describes. Interesting that the computer has gone from a tool to a new way of thinking; I know that when you are a programmer for awhile you start thinking about the world as a series of undocumented little machines, some of which can be figured out and some which can't. I believe looking back the largest advances over the next ten years are going to be us figuring out - for better or worse - how our own bodies actually work.

12:53 AM part of tech

October 01, 2002

Goal

"Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power."

Seneca

08:40 PM part of inspiration

Spider crawling

I saw a spider crawling across my desk today and I starting thinking about movement. He was tiny and moving very slowly; I watched him take about twenty seconds to make it across my mousepad. He was probably born in the building and will die here, never really knowing what it feels like outside. That is a little depressing to me given all of the good places right outside for him to build his web.

Where do I go? I spend most of my time in this little mousepad of my own, I drive to and from work on the same path, I walk down the same halls in the same direction, I visit the same places on the weekend. Seen from above, my movement patterns over my entire life look like the first ten seconds of a mice trying to find his way out of an enormous, complex maze.

Suddenly jealous of the spider, I move to kill him, but he is gone.

06:33 PM part of work