Harriet: "I got a laugh at the table read when I asked for the butter in the dinner sketch. I didn't get it at the dress. What did I do wrong?"
Matt: "It's one laugh out of thirty you're going to get tonight."
Harriet: "What did I do wrong?"
Matt: "You asked for the laugh."
Harriet: "What did I do at the table read?"
Matt: "You asked for the butter."
--Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, 1x02, The Cold Open
When I was still at Microsoft, a friend of mine (who may not want to be associated with it) and I invented the word "stratragic" to describe decisions or actions that the company made which were touted as being strategic but which had--at least in our opinion--tragic consequences. Without going into details, we applied the word to events involving (for example), the Xbox, Longhorn, and the various employee benefits.
I now present you with my newest word: pragmantic. It is used to describe romantics who approach romanticism with a dose of pragmatism. For example, using a USB drive and some MP3s in place of a mix CD. (Note that this does not include sending email Flash animated valentines, which is just tacky.)
Go forth and spread your love pragmantically. (Look, I didn't say it was a good word, okay?)
Security is hard.
When people talk about security, they usually mean that they want to prevent some action from being take against some object: “I want to prevent the money from being stolen.” “I want to only teachers to be able to change the grade records.” “I want to keep attackers from gaining entry to the computer system.”
Security is really about economics, weighing costs against benefits. The goal of security is to make the cost of taking some unwanted action against an object greater than the benefit of securing it plus the value of the object itself. If you say “I want to prevent the money from being stolen,” you really mean “I want it to be more expensive to steal the money than the total value of the money plus the cost to protect it.” That’s why we feel secure in keeping 50 dollars in our wallet, but we hire armored trucks and guards with shotguns to feel secure in dealing with 500,000 dollars.
Sometimes the simple and obvious security solution—guards with shotguns—is the right solution. With security, however, the devil is in the details.
Consider: “I want to make sure that the yogurt I buy isn’t spoiled.”
Continue reading "Yogurt and security: a tale of two things" »
Why does Borders sell a chocolate fondue set? Complete with chocolate and a fondue pot? Oh, sure, it includes a "how to make chocolate fondue" book as well, but come on--are we as a society so pressed for time that, once we've decided that we want to take the time to make chocolate fondue, that we can't be bothered to actually visit multiple stores in order to gather all the necessary materials?
I thought bundling a harmonica with a "how to play the harmonica" book was bad enough. When the day comes that I can go to Borders and buy a book on "how to plan the perfect wedding" that includes a fiancee, this trend will have gone too far.
Well, okay, maybe by then it will have gone just far enough.
And what is so hard about making air fresheners for cars that the ones you buy never smell like they're supposed to? I tried the "new car smell" one, but it made my car smell like a methamphetamine lab. So I figured that "pine scent" would be a nice alternative, but that one gave off an odor that made me think that a pine forest had anthropomorphised into a human-like form and urinated all over my car's interior. Finally, I settled on "vanilla" figuring that there was no way anybody could fuck up the scent of vanilla. Well, I was wrong. My car now smells vaguely like someone got drunk on Stoli Vanli and hurled on my back seat. I'd try to clean it all up with some Febreeze, but I'm afraid it would just make things smell like bloated corpse or something. I give up.
Got this in my inbox today:
I'm not sure which bothers me more, though: The fact that the spammer didn't bother to fill in the phishing email template, or that there is spamming software that provides a phishing email template.
This one is for Rach: "The goal is garbage in, writers out: Teachers who fail to correct bad student papers are shirkers"
"...'I believe in my second amendment that is the right to bare arms.'
A college student wrote that line, one of a couple dozen I pulled from a batch of student papers for use as a classroom exercise during my last year of full-time teaching.
The student who wrote that line was quite bright. She was funny, quick- witted and intellectually curious. She did not write well. It is possible she will write well in the future, but she made only small progress during her brief sojourn through my remedial English class."
So, Rach, go ahead and lift your red pen proudly! And never forget those four magical words: See Me After Class.
Ah, the banana slug. Probably Ariolimax columbianus. These suckers get big. And I mean big. Like up to six inches long. And they are pretty damn ugly.
One of the nice things about Flickr is that along with nice tools to organize photos, you can explore the collections of other people. You can even mark certain photos as favorites, and you automatically get a gallery of all your favorite photos, independent of who posted them.
Along with the ability to pick favorite pictures and leave comments, Flickr lets you see who has left comments on your own photos, or who has picked one of your pictures as a favorite. I noticed the other day that someone had "favorited" these three pictures from Steve's bachelor party weekend:
Now, these are all decent pictures, but I didn't recognize the person who picked them, and there are certainly better pictures from that weekend.
But of course, Flickr lets you look at other peoples' Favorites galleries... and once I looked at the favorite pictures of my mysterious Flickr user, it all became clear.
I've decided to give the photo hosting service Flickr a try. I've put up a bunch of pictures there, and I'd appreciate your feedback on the move.
You can either see all my pictures, or:
Hopefully this is a more convenient way to share photos for both me and for you.
I have a terrible track record with digital cameras. Terrible, in that I have an uncanny knack for destroying them. Actually, my knack isn't limited to digital cameras; of the last four cameras I've owned (two of them digital), one was stepped on, one was slammed in a car door, one was lost, and one was dropped into a lake.
So, having demonstrated conclusively that buying a camera is not only a poor investment but also a stupendously bad idea, I bought myself a shiny new digital camera before embarking on my trip to Alaska. (I'll remind you at this point that my trip involved three commercial flights, twelve hours of driving, four days of camping and hiking, and two days of kayaking.)
The future did not look bright for my new camera.
Ah, but fool me five times and shame on me. This time, I would get a replacement plan. Normally, I'd tell you that if you buy any sort of electronics you should steer far clear of any of those so-called "service plans". I'd tell you that they are a scam, because they are. They provide essentially zero additional protection above and beyond the manufacturer's warranty. They're completely useless to you as a consumer, and they are almost 100% profit to the store (and more importantly, the saleperson) who cons you into buying one.
I shopped around at all of the major area stores that deal in cameras, and I had one question which served as my litmus test for purchasing a camera from them:
"Would your service plan cover accidentally running over this camera with a car?"
As you might expect, the answer was always in the negative. One salesman thought I was kidding, and when I assured him I was not, his expression became one of despair. A couple of times I just got stunned looks, but usually they'd just say, "Um, no." And so I moved on to the next store.
At one local camera shop, though, my experience was different. I didn't even have to ask my litmus question. When I asked for a brochure on their replacement plan, the salesman handed me a handout titled "Expanded Service Plan" which, on the cover, had a picture of a camera that had been run over by a car. The caption read "Has this happened to you?" I briefly considered applying for a job right then and there. At first, I thought my discovery was too good to be true, and then I read this clause in their service plan agreement:
"...no claim may be made unless the covered equipment or parts thereof suitable for its positive identification, are presented at the time of the claim." (emphasis mine) Done and done.
And off I went, boldy defying my own disasterous track record, carrying some hundreds of dollars worth of camera, batteries, memory cards, etc. Secure in the knowledge that I needed only to scavenge some smoking bits of plastic in order to have the camera replaced upon my return. (You might think that having such a replacement plan would make me more reckless, but I think I've already demonstrated that I'm already quite reckless without even trying.)
Okay, I don't have a very funny way to end this story; I'm sorry for that. Suffice it to say that I did not lose, step on, crush, or submerge my new camera. It still works. For now.
The last two digital cameras I've owned both suffered untimely destruction. One was smashed in a car door (or possibly sat on, or more probably both), and the other was dropped into Lake Washington. Despite my less-than-favorable track record with cameras, I needed to get something with which to document my upcoming travels, so I am now on my third camera. Hopefully this one will still be working in six months; this would be a personal record.
Now, I'm no photographer, but I'm pretty happy with the pictures I've managed to take so far. Here are a few samples:
Marymoor Off-Leash Dog Area
Marymoor Park
Some Flowers
Some Other Stuff
As you can tell, I've been having fun playing with the macro mode on my camera. At one point I had about two dozen close-up pictures of all kinds of random stuff in my apartment, so just be thankful that I didn't subject you to "Things In My Fridge Up Close: A Study in Still Life".
Am I alone in being particular about the kinds of tumblers I like to drink out of? Must be glass. Anything else is tumbler blasphemy. Has to have a thick, solid base. The sides should be straight--perpendicular to the base--not curved or angled. And no fancy designs or etching or patterns or facets. Smooth, round. Not square. And the sides should be thick; not as thick as the base, but substantial. Not to make them resistant to breaking (structural strength is only a secondary consideration), but to make the clink of the glass more resonant. And the clink is important: not high-pitched; that sounds too fragile for a tumbler. I'd say the sound when you toast another glass should be roughly baritone. And resonant. There should be a deep, solid, clink when you drop ice cubes in from just above the rim.
Bars seem to almost always have the right kind of tumblers, but I'll be damned if I can find a store that sells them. And there's no way I'm going to buy them online without being able to see and hold them first.
Maybe I'm too picky about my tumblers.
Dear Jake,
According to my reciept from Discount Tire Co., Inc., I have you to thank for torquing my lug nuts after I bought new tires for my car. I am quite pleased with the torquing you performed and, although I will never know your last name, I write this letter to you in the hopes that one day you will Google your first name and the company you work for (or worked for) and happen upon these words expressing my gratitute. My 100 foot-pounds of gratitude.
Torque on, Jake. Torque on.
(P.S. I don't mean that "100 foot-pounds of gratitude" in a weird way or anything. The same goes for "torquing my lug nuts.")
