cellio | Entries tagged with humor

(Click through for the mouse-over text.) Nice.

Tomorrow night is Purim, which at my synagogue is usually on the, err, juvenile side. (It must be possible to be accessible to kids while not talking down to adults, but we haven't mastered it yet.) However, I learned last week that, probably at the instigation of our newest rabbi, we are also going to have an adults-only gathering after the megillah reading and spiel -- text study with food and "adult beverages". I offered to contribute a little home-brew mead and he said to bring it along. Should be fun. (But not good old "HS 98", which recently got a surprisingly-good review from a friend who found some in her basement. I only have a few bottles left and I'm saving them for special occasions. :-) )

I'm considering going somewhere else for the megillah reading and then going to my congregation for the adult study/festivities. This is hindered by the Chronicle, for the first time I've ever noticed, omitting the calendar of congregational services this week. Gee, thanks. So I'll have to look them up individually.

Purim seems a fine time for the roll-out of this contest in Peeps art. I must give this some thought. Check out the prizes -- $100 gift card, blah blah, dental hygeine products. Um, yeah. And should I enter and win, I think it highly unlikely that I would use the Peeps lip balm, though I would look with curiosity through "Peeps: Recipes and Crafts". (Understand that I can't actually eat Peeps because they're not kosher, but there's no rule against using them in art projects.) Can any of my readers suggest a punny title around the exodus from Egypt? I figure a seasonal tie-in would help, but it sounds like a pun is especially important and I'm terrible at that. ("Let my peeps go?" Needs work, I think.) If I use your suggestion, you can have dibs on the lip balm. :-)

Speaking of contests, from Snopes: in 1984 a newspaper announced a Daylight Saving Time contest to see who could save the most daylight. Fun stuff. (I think this would be better designated Daylight Shifting Time, as there is no saving involved.)

Query to the brain trust: I have USB headphones that include a microphone. What free software can I use to record voice from that microphone (preferably on Windows XP but I also have an iBook with OS 10.4 available) and produce something like WAV files? (I know I'm not going to get stellar audio quality from this setup; that's ok. The immediate goal is to record torah chanting -- think "teaching tapes", except no one uses tape any more.)

Followup on UJF: I spoke with the campaign manager on Friday and she was very apologetic. She promised to take appropriate action. (I've updated the original entry to reflect this.)

This week my employer's landlord started giving preferred parking spots to people driving green vehicles (definition not provided). Not that I'm going to turn down the convenience (my Honda Fit qualifies), but as one of my coworkers pointed out, are those the cars for which they want to minimize driving? (Should we try to get the gas guzzlers to stop on the first floor instead?) I used to always park on the top indoor floor, mostly so I could park in the same place every day and not have to worry about remembering at the end of the day. Now that I think about it, that decision represented about 2-3% of my commuting distance.

You know that "25 things about me" meme that's been going around? Maybe it's older than you thought. Or maybe not. :-)

The local SCA got some decent TV coverage recently.

Via

jducoeur: Facebook company secrets were revealed by someone who applied paper analogies to digital media. Oops. No, white-out doesn't work on bits. (From the news story it sounds like it might have been the court that screwed up, which presumably means they can't sue anyone for the leak.)

Birkat ha Chamah is a once-every-28-years observance, and it's coming up this April. I wonder if anyone local is doing anything for this. It sounds kind of peculiar, but it'll be a while before I could next satisfy my curiosity. (The timing is inconvenient with respect to Pesach, however.)

Glow-in-the-dark body cream, pointed out by

browngirl.

Thanks to

xiphias for pointing out this comic to me: ( moderately-large image )

Having completed the first pass at digitizing or replacing our folk music on old media (we still need to do some proof-listening), Dani and I are merging our iTunes libraries so this might be easier going forward. Oof. We're up to "S" so far. "T" is big because it includes all the "The"s. Tracking changes (e.g. to tagging) going forward is still going to be a bit of a challenge.

Was Joe Biden president of the US for about 5 minutes today? (We were watching in a conference room at work, and it was several minutes past noon before they got to Obama's swearing-in. So I'm curious.)

In English we say "it's all Greek to me". What do speakers of other languages say? Whom do they implicate? Wonder no more; Language Log has a nice graph of some of these. I admit to being surprised by China's designee.

What if the stop sign were designed by corporations? (link from

filkerdave)

As

dsrtao said, an airline charging a cancellation fee when they rebooked you on a downed flight is near-canonical chutzpah. (Yes, I saw the note that they recanted.)

This story of a mailing list gone wrong (from Microsoft) made me laugh. And sigh, because while I haven't had to deal with quite that level of mess, even 20ish years after mailing lists started to become broadly accessible, there are still an awful lot of people out there who don't behave appropriately.

There's an interesting discussion of filtering and politeness on social networks over on CommYou.

Note to self: if Shalom Hartman Institute is too expensive this summer, the Aleph kallah might be an alternative. It could be good or it could be too esoteric for me; I can't tell from the available information. When they post class descriptions I'll have a better idea. I had a similar concern about NHC but it turned out to be good, so I'm keeping an open mind. Has anyone reading this gone to one of these?

( Read more... )

I used to occasionally have a problem with an overnight power outage killing the alarm clock and causing me to oversleep, but I've more recently realized that having a UPS or three means never having to fear that again. :-) (Fortunately, today's power outage came after we were up, not in the middle of the night, and only lasted about five minutes. I was just about ready to interrupt my morning grooming to shut down computers when the need went away.)

In the "interesting if true, and interesting anyway" department: earlier this week I learned that the folks who handle disposal of sensitive documents for my company are blind. (Well, not the truck driver.) If I understand correctly, the local blind association arranges this, as sort of an extra guarantee or something. Who'd'a thought?

Signal boost: it looks like someone's testing stolen credit-card numbers on a large scale. Check your statement for microtransactions; they're testing the cards with ~20-cent transactions to verify that they're good before hammering them. Link from

jducoeur.

A few days ago my copy of I Remember the Future by

mabfan arrived. Yay! I'll have some nice reading for Shabbat.

Oldest LOLcat? Link from

siderea.

My doctor confirmed that I should be taking calcium supplements now to (with luck) fend off problems later. Where can I find calcium tablets that are sized for, y'know, normal people and not horses? Most bottles in stores don't even include pictures on the label, so it's hit or miss. The oblong ones I have are scored for cutting widthwise, but I need them to be narrower, not necessarily shorter, and my attempts to do that have all ended badly. What do other women of a certain age do?

As we go through the process of digitizing our non-digital music and ripping the CDs, both Dani and I have had multiple instances of iTunes crapping out on us in various ways. Usually the failure mode is that it takes over all the CPU, won't respond, and forces a reboot. Or it'll just decide to stop paying attention to the CD drive and not acknowledge the disc I just put in. Is this iTunes' doing, or Windows'?

Anyway, yesterday we ripped about 100 folk CDs. Progress. I've been going through tape-recorded Clam Chowder concerts. I hope to one day identify the source of the five stray tracks at the end of another concert tape -- a tape I had actually catalogued at the time, but I didn't record those additions. Hmm.

Links:

One Velociraptor Per Child, from

jducoeur. I hope they're offering a buy-one-get-one program; Dani really wants his own velociraptor.

From

shalmestere: dressage... with a camel (video). I didn't know they could do that.

From

siderea: feline cavalry (video).

kyleri passed on this twist on animal rescue.

From a locked post: curry can stave off Alzheimers?. If so, I'm even happier that Sree's is now selling Indian food across the street from my office.

A coworker is currently helping to train a bloodhound for police work. She is not in the law-enforcement business; she happens to run an animal sanctuary when she's not being a software geek, and somehow that apparently led to this. How cool. (Also sounds like a lot of work; she's training with the dog every morning and evening for the next couple weeks.)

Erik's appetite has been much improved this past week. I'm not sure what's different, but I'm glad to see it. We have not started him on prednizone yet; my vet is playing phone-tag with assorted specialists first.

Porridge: what really happened that fateful morning.

A funny cat video (from a locked entry, so identify yourself if you like but I won't).

This bunny hero made me smile (link from

paquerette). I had a house rabbit for a few months a long time ago (before the cats). He was a rescue, and I'd read that rabbits were smart enough to be trained to use a litter box. I failed at that and wasn't interested in keeping him in a cage his entire life, so he went off to live with other house-trained rabbits on the theory that there's power in crowds.

From Language Log: be careful your translation says what you think it does.

Hey, CMU alum from approximately my generation, and others who enjoy quirky folk music: Michael Spiro has made much of his music available for free download. (I'm going to buy one of the CDs anyway, because he asked nicely and I believe in supporting independent musicians. I have the other on vinyl, so I probably won't buy the CD.) I particularly commend to you "The Folkie" and "Killing Me Softly With Kung-Fu". I would also point you at "Music, Sex, and Cookies", except the file appears to be corrupted. :-(

We visited with my parents (and sister) this afternoon. Ironically, my father is also contemplating digitization of his music collection.

Does anyone know where I can get some of those microfiber cloths that sometimes come with glasses and things with delicate screens? Or, failing that, a reliable way to wash them so that they (1) get clean and soft and (2) don't die in the wash?

"The other day, I bought a toaster. It came with a free bank." -

xiphias

Two cat links:
Leslie Fish on smart cats (funny, from

thnidu) and how a blind cat saved his owner's life (touching, from

scaharp).

Microsoft announces 20 editions of Windows 7 (from

dr_zrfq).

Presidental candidates play an RPG (forwarded by

siderea).

Fun, unconventional greeting cards from

ohiblather.

"What's the capital of Iceland? About £3.50." (forwarded by

nancylebov).

And finally, an edible Flying Spaghetti Monster from

kmelion (cool!):

It looks like Congress is on the verge of passing the bailout bill. Sigh. I feel like I want to say more about that, but it's not coming. In the meantime, this background explanation from David Director Friedman seems sound to me.

To maybe bring some cheer in the wake of that, it's clean-out-the-browser-tabs day:

The sanctuary in the desert, modernized by

hobbitblue:
You can go North, South, East or West
>N
There is a table of bread here
>Eat bread
You are not hungry, trust me.
[...]

The great schlep -- an organized campaign to send kids to Florida to convince their grandparents to vote for Obama. Or, at least, they'll visit. :-) Link from

browngirl and

mamadeb.

Duckling scam from

zachkessin.

Q: How many children of a dysfunctional family does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Your brother would know.
Passed on by

siderea.

Sarah Palin Disney (video) forwarded by

tangerinpenguin made me laugh.

hrj made mock sushi.

I want this lamp (from

nancylebov).

I found this video touching, right before Rosh Hashana (it has no religious content). Forwarded by

530nm330hz.

And finally, sing to your pooky is a thoughtful entry from

scaharp.

goldsquare's post on 9/11 is short and to the point. I wrote and deleted more words before seeing this, so I'll just point you there.

Tonight I got one of the most polite political-solicitation phone calls I can remember receiving, from the local Obama campaign. With all the dirt, both real and manufactured, in the political arena, it was nice to have a pleasant and non-pushy conversation. Had I not been on my way out the door, I would have accepted her offer to answer my questions. But I am welcome to stop in at their local office three blocks from my home any time I like, she said. (I assume she doesn't really have anything that isn't on the campaign web site, but sometimes the human interaction is nice.)

This was more timely yesterday, but: http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/ is worth a look. Do look closely. :-) Thanks to

browngirl for the link.

From a recent conversation about workplace diversity: "We have a very diverse department. We have emacs and vi users." :-)

A pet butterfly? Link from

mabfan.

A light-hearted comment on the economy relayed by

thnidu.

I'll be leading services tomorrow night (and Saturday morning) at my synagogue, including reading torah. (Both the rabbis are away.) I'm looking forward to it. One small monkey wrench was thrown at me -- last week we switched to a new siddur for Friday nights, an interim prayerbook based on the forthcoming Mishkan T'filah. (MT is out, but our copies are still "forthcoming".) So all the familiar page numbers are wrong, some of the songs are in different places, some of the English is a little different, etc. I borrowed a copy and applied stickie notes for a few page cues; it should be fine. (If you're local and want to come, that's 7:00 tomorrow night.)

When I registered for the NHC summer institute (the learning program I'm going to after Pennsic), I checked off the "willing to read torah" box. I had looked at the portion; there is one very long aliya (two columns!) and the rest are managable, but there was no place to indicate "but please not levi". Fortunately, they don't just send out assignments; yesterday I got mail asking what I'm interested in. (There are several options, not just Shabbat morning.) There were a bunch of people on the To: line of that message, including some with "rab" in their user names. I hope I won't be outclassed. I don't think so.

Links:

The Art of Conversation is a new blog that promises to cover some of the issues, philosophical and practical, of online conversations. Good stuff from

jducoeur and others; I suspect it will appeal to many of my readers.

Running for office the XKCD way (link from a locked post). I loved the first campaign attempt (the petition drive), though I agree it was ill-advised.

Misspelled signs are common, but this collection of signs with the same error made me laugh.

Speaking of misspellings, this thread in

magid's journal is fun. Doesn't everyone know about the fourteenth-century Sephardim/Ashkenazim diphthong wars?

Duck Darwin awards (source forgotten), or "what happens when a duck builds a nest on a high-rise?".

Vegan zombie t-shirt (from

kmelion). It looks like the shirt doesn't actually exist and it's just a design. Pity.

Tonight/tomorrow is Shavuot, which is one of my favorite holidays thematically. I understand that both of our rabbis will be at the tikkun leil shavuot, late-night torah study, this year, which should be loads of fun. Tonight's dinner will be blintzes, and tomorrow's lunch will be cheesy noodles (featured cheeses this time are havarti, cheddar, and swiss, with others too). Mmm, dairy. :-) Chag sameach to those who celebrate, and happy Monday to the rest of you.

I recently bought an amplified indoor TV antenna, and I gave it a spin today. With some fiddling, I can get very good reception on most channels I care about and acceptable reception on the rest. (Some channels with less-than-acceptable reception are ones I don't care about. WPCB, I'm looking at you.) I'm also picking up some channels not on the list of Pittsburgh stations at Wikipedia. (Don't know what they are yet. My local newspaper doesn't list them either.) Currently the antenna is hooked up to one VCR; when I cancel the cable service I'll plug it into the splitter currently fed by the cable instead, but that's harder to get to so not optimal for testing.

Yesterday we ended up in a spontaneous game of Runebound with three other people. The game nominally supports up to six players, but with five I felt we were too resource-constrained, both in stat-boost chits (which you get for accumulating experience) and lower-level encounters (which you must defeat to gain the experience). I dropped out of the game when all the green (1-point) and yellow (2-point) encounters were gone, I had no money with which to buy equipment, and I could not yet survive a purple (3-point) encounter. No bootstrapping was possible unless a rare event were to occur, and in the meantime I'd just be twiddling my thumbs. I've played this game two or three times before without that happening to any player, but I can't remember if I've played with this many players before. (Oh, and this was not the four-hour game promised by the box. After I dropped out near the four-hour mark, the others played for another hour, maybe more.)

The weather has been uncharacteristically (for June) sweltering for the last couple days. We have central air on the second floor; we caved and turned it on on Friday. We have a huge window unit in the living room that we sometimes use to supplement, particularly if people are coming over or we're generating lots of heat (e.g. from cooking). Yesterday Dani turned it on for the gamers and it started making that noise appliances make when they're unhappy and want you to know from anywhere in the house. It was blowing air, but the air wasn't cool. I'm unclear on whether this means it's hungry and needs a freon refill (I'm guessing there's freon involved), or if it's something else. This unit came with the house, so it's not exactly new, but the window might be too big for the deprecated AC we took out of our bedroom when we bought the central unit. (We still have the window unit in the attic.) Well, nothing I can do about it for the next couple days, so no sense worrying about it.

Found by Dani: mykleenextissue.com, for vanity Kleenex boxes. Err, yeah. At least it's not for vanity Kleenex. Even so, I'm not sure "let out your creative juices" was the best choice of a slogan. I also note that -- as often happens -- their FAQ does not address my most-frequent questions, which in this case include "do you have customers?". :-)

Bill Walsh posted this and I now share:

Humor:

This Frazz strip rings true. :-)

Quote of the day, by gnomi: "The simple carbohydrate asks, 'What's this?' To him you should explain about all the starches that are chametz, but not the afikomen."

Ten Principles of Economics, Translated includes this gem and many others: "Microeconomists are wrong about specific things; macroeconomists are wrong in general". (link from osewalrus.)

These greeting cards are a little off the beaten path. One of my minions sent me one of these a while ago, but I'd forgotten about the site until jducoeur pointed it out.

His and hers diary entries is heavily stereotyped, but funny.

Not humor:

When your tech tells you something is a Bad Idea by siderea is important for everyone who hires consultants, broadly speaking.

mabfan's SF story collection, I Remember the Future, will be coming out in September. I've read several of the stories in the collection and look forward to reading the rest.

Maritan Headsets (from Joel on Software) is a long but worthwhile article on software standards -- both not having them early enough, and having them and trying to enforce them. Parts of it made me laugh out loud, like the paragraph containing this passage: "[...] but of course when you plug the headphones into FireQx 3.0 lo and behold they explode in your hands because of a slight misunderstanding about some obscure thing in the spec which nobody really understands called hasLayout, and everybody understands that when it's raining the hasLayout property is true and the voltage is supposed to increase to support the windshield-wiper feature, but there seems to be some debate over whether hail and snow are rain for the purposes of hasLayout..."

Rescue me: a fed bailout crosses a line seems (to this non-expert) like a good analysis of what just happened to the market and the dollar. (Need a login ID? Try BugMeNot.) I am more scared, and more angry, about our government's economic policies than I've been in a while. As someone on my subscription list said (I forget who), the people who actually took personal responsibility and saved rather than spending recklessly are the ones who are going to get hammered by this, while the idiots who bought houses (or corporate holdings) they couldn't afford and racked up tons of debt will be bailed out because we can't stand to say "too bad you were an idiot".

As long as I'm saying "too bad"... too bad, Michigan and Florida. Agreed.

On a lighter note: Garfield Minus Garfield is surreal. And since seeing it a week or so ago, I haven't been able to read Garfield "straight".

An article in my local dead-tree news reported on something I'd been wondering about for a while: are allergies and asthma more prevalent than they used to be (versus just being diagnosed more), and, if so, is it because of lifestyle changes? Yes and yes, apparently; research shows that more sterile environments mean our immune systems don't have as much to do, so they go off and find other ways to keep busy. (I couldn't find the local article online; Google found me this one from half a year ago.) I'm glad my parents let me play in the great outdoors and eat anything, and that we had pets, when I was growing up; I do have some allergies (environmental, not food), but they're mild. I feel sorry for one of my in-laws: his parents are hyper-paranoid about food allergies and are attempting to build a shield around him. They didn't come to our wedding because we couldn't guarantee that none of a long list of foods had never passed through the hall's kitchen. That kid is going to be a mess when he grows up, and he's probably going to think this is normal when he has kids of his own. Ugh.

Via Slashdot: daylight "saving" time actually increases energy usage. ("Saving" is a misnomer; we should call it "daylight shifting time", which is all it accomplishes. There are not, after all, storehouses in which we collect excess sunlight for use during lean times; nothing is saved.) The researchers were handed a great data-collection opportunity: they did their work in Indiana, where until recently some counties did DST and others did not. So they not only had before-and-after data, but also a control group nearby to factor out weather and the like.

A few days ago a house in Plum (near Pittsburgh) exploded, apparently from a gas leak. (I actually saw this on national news before I saw the local news.) This made me wonder whether it's possible to build a detector (other than the human nose) for household use. We have smoke detectors and carbon-monoxide detectors; why have I never heard of a gas-buildup detector? Granted that such incidents are extremely rare, but they are potentially much more devastating than fires and CO buildup, so if an inexpensive household gadget could provide some potential warning, that'd be great.

In lighter news:

You know that "who do you want to answer the phone at 3AM?" ad the Clinton campaign is running? The little girl in the ad was stock footage; she's now an adult and working on the Obama campaign (via insomnia).

Headline of the day, from thnidu: Skywalkers in Korea Cross Han Solo.

Who thought it would be a good idea to put strobe lights on school buses? Fortunately we're past the time (until next fall) when I ever see them before dawn, but they're still annoying. Clue delivery: drivers are safest when our eyes are on the road, not when we're distracted by something wacky in the peripheral vision! And you're a bus, for crying out loud; you're way more visible than the cyclists.

Harvesting a few browser tabs...

I has a sweet potato made me laugh so hard I couldn't see. Really. Several times. (Link from

hobbitblue.)

In the interest of species equality, cat laws.

Too many books for the available shelf space? Not a problem!. (Source forgotten.)

Time breakdown of modern web design in this entry is spot-on.

I've mentioned before that my synagogue maintains a freezer of donated, cooked food to have on hand for houses of mourning, families where someone's sick, and similar acute cases of need. I think this is a great idea; if you're cooking anyway you can cook a little more to donate and help someone out. Yesterday I got email from the person who monitors this saying they're low on meat and pareve dishes, so tonight I'm roasting an oven-full of chicken to take over (less one meal's worth for ourselves this week), and tomorrow night I will make some vegetarian soup. I love being able to help in this way.

Speaking of soups, recently Dani and I were at a restaurant where I had a really fabulous butternut-squash soup. This one was dairy (I detected cream), and I couldn't identify all the spices. Web-surfing has led me to some promising recipes; I'm open to specific suggestions. I have now procured one butternut squash with which to experiment.

I'm about 40% of the way through the second book of His Dark Materials. I am pretty sure I know what the deal was with Grummon (the explorer Asriel went off in search of). So either I'm right or the author is being clever and has something up his sleeve. It feels pretty darn obvious, so I'm not ruling out the latter. (No, please don't tell me; I'll know on my own soon.)

The local SCA choir is singing at an event this weekend. I think we sounded really good at Monday's practice; I'm looking forward to the performance. We'll also be doing one piece jointly with our instrumental group, which is nifty. We haven't done that in years.

Jericho returns for a short second season (half-season?) next week. I really liked this show, so I'm glad to see it unharmed by the writers' strike. Whether it is harmed by its network is yet to be seen. (They cancelled it and then responded to a fan campaign.)

Assorted links (most sources lost, sorry):

Baby dos and don'ts. That the site is not in English really doesn't matter.

Surfing cat. It's not entirely clear to me that this is the cat's idea.

Joel on Software recommends Tripit for keeping track of the assorted confirmation numbers involved in travelling. Sounds useful especially for us infrequent travellers who don't have the routine down already.

Bruce Schneier on security versus privacy. Too many people think it's a zero-sum game; it's not.

Bookmarking (haven't finished reading yet): Rands in Repose on preparing presentations. It's odd: in most contexts public speaking is, ahem, not my strong suit. Really not my strong suit, even in fields I know very well. I get nervous and fumbly-mouthed. The exception? While I'm not as skilled at the mechanics yet as I'd like to be, giving sermons or divrei torah does not make me nervous.

I pass this on too late for voters in half the primaries in the country, but even so, there's a general election coming, so:

jducoeur nails what's really important in choosing a candidate. (PA doesn't vote until late April. It's possible we won't actually be irrelevant this time, but we'll see how today turns out.)

George Bush v Mohammed ibn Tugluq by David Director Friedman, on whom the law binds.

Dani and I saw a performance by Second City last night. It was a mixed bag -- some very funny bits, some that fell flat for me, and more scripted than improv (which surprised me). I hadn't realized that Second City is sort of a franchise; there are several troupes out there using the name. I assume they share base material. (This show was, in part, customized for Pittsburgh, some in ways that could be easily reused and some not.) The Second City we saw in Toronto years ago was doing something akin to modern commedia dell'arte; the local show was (mostly) more-conventional comedy sketches. Still fun, as I said -- just different. (I think my favorite was the sketch where the teenager's mom starts answering the instant messages on his computer. Serves the kid right for not using a password, I say. :-) )

Someone local took a few thousand dollars and ran in the NH presidential primary, and he actually came in ahead of some of the "real" candidates. The local newspaper reports his reaction to receiving this news thus: "Son of a (gun), no (kidding)? That's (really) amazing." Or something like that, anyway. :-)

Commenting on the FBI getting its wiretaps shut off for non-payment of bills, xiphias posted this story that made me laugh. I'm not saying I believe it -- just that it made me laugh.

If you've read a little talmud, or haven't but still laughed at the halacha of Xmas, you will probably enjoy Tractate Laundry, linked by velveteenrabbi.

Pleo, a robotic dinosaur reminiscent of Aibo, looks like it would be a fun geek-toy. I wonder what the cats would do. (No, I am not going to spend that kind of money to find out. :-) )

I realized tonight that we have more phones (plugged in, on the landline, I mean) than we get (legitimate) calls in a month. Um... I'm not sure what that says about us. (Why do we have a landline? Aside from the general-precautions factor, because there is one use case not covered well by cell phones: the caller just needs to reach, or leave a message for, the household, and not a specific member.)

On Christmas, it is customary for Jews to go out for Chinese food and a movie. I'll have you know that Dani and I are not so stereotypical: this year we are going out for Japanese food and a movie. So there. :-) (Tomorrow should be a glorious day for getting work done. There were only about six people in the office today.)

This discussion of teaching INTJs resonates in many ways. Speaking of siderea, check out her surrealistic junk mail. (I have had similar "WTF?" reactions to some of the junk mail I get, but she articulates it better.)

With spammers lately trying the "random sequence of 4-8 letters in the subject line" gambit, it was only a matter of time before a Viagra ad was cloakced in coherence. The one that got me had a subject line of "junit" and was sent to my work address.

This eBay auction (link from _subdivisions_) takes an old prank to a new level:

I will be spending the Christmas holiday in Poland in a tiny village that has one church with no bell because angry Germans stole it. Aside from vodka, there is not a lot for me to do. During the course of my holiday I will send three postcards to one person of your choosing. These postcards will be rant-ravingly insane, yet they will be peppered with unmistakable personal details about the addressee. Details you will provide me.

I am not especially surprised that he was able to find a market for this. I am surprised by the winning bid!

A coworker passed along this XP review. Fun stuff:

I have finally decided to take the plunge. Last night I upgraded my Vista desktop machine to Windows XP, and this afternoon I will be doing the same to my laptop. [...] All I can say is "wow!" You can see that a lot of work has gone into making XP more reliable than its predecessor. The random program crashes, and hangs appear to be a thing of the past.

It's snarky and over the top, but I got some giggles from it. (I have never used Vista.)

( Read more... )

The project for which I'm tech lead had its first release today. Yay. Now maybe I'll have more brain cells for other tasks. :-)

Heard from Dani while he was playing Diablo with a friend: "The client is willing, but the server is weak".

Time to clear out some of the browser tabs:

If you use a radio adapter to get signal from your MP3 player to your car stereo, you might find this search engine for empty FM bands handy (from

cahwyguy, I think).

Tech-support inspirational poster (courtesy of

dr_zrfq).

The great pizza-orientation test (I forget where I found this).

Iraq by the numbers collects together some interesting statistics in one place.

I don't cruise YouTube, but in the last few days several funny ones have been posted on blogs I read, so I'm going to share.

But first, a nifty photo of migratory birds posted by spinozany from Reuters:

( videos )

I've noticed that when there is a great feline tussle in my house that leaves piles of hair around, the vast majority of the time the hair belongs to Baldur. I see several possibilities: (1) his greater surface area makes him more likely to be hit; (2) his hair just doesn't stay attached as well as the other cats'; (3) he gets picked on a lot (he's the biggest cat BTW); or (4) he has developed the "eject hair" escape technique. Hmm.

I missed the first episode of the new TV show "Pushing Daisies" but caught the second. Wacky! Surreal! Fun! The narration as commentary is a nice touch. Yeah, that it's written by the person who did "Wonderfalls" shows; I hope "Pushing Daisies" fares better. ("Wonderfalls" was great for about 8 or 9 episodes, then sucked for a couple more, and was then pulled after 13.) I'm also watching "Journeyman", about which I'm undecided.

We drove through the rockslide zone of Route 28 on the way to visit my parents today. No rockslides were in progress at the time, and it looked like last week's had been completely cleared. The news had said inbound lanes would be completely closed for the weekend, but we saw continuous traffic while we were driving outbound so we didn't look for an alternate path home. It turned out that one lane was open. That was fine for a Sunday, but I'll bet it sucks for commuters right now. That said, rockslides suck more.

Two Shabbatot ago a first-time (in our minyan) Israeli torah reader asked me to be his checker. I expressed concern that I wouldn't be able to keep up; he said he reads holy texts slowly. His "slow" was too fast for me. Then this past Shabbat a different reader asked me to check for him and I figured this wouldn't be a problem; I had just a bit of trouble keeping up. Both times I was checking from the new Plaut (oodles better than the old Plaut), and using a magnifying glass to be safe. I conclude that my problem is Plaut + magnifier, not necessarily me, and I should only check when I can do it from larger Hebrew text such as what Trope Trainer produces. (I'm not the only torah reader in our group who uses that software, and in fact I have been handed TT output to check from at times.)

Without saying anything about the merits of Al Gore's work, I do admit to being puzzled by how this is a peace issue. Of course, in political processes all bets of rationality are off, but still... isn't there a more appropriate category in which to consider his work?

I heard a cute story recently: One night at dinner the seven-year-old girl asks her parents "where did I come from?" Oh crap, the parents each think; we thought we had a few more years before we'd have to deal with this. They exchange glances and then fumble through a discussion of birds, bees, and what happens "when mommies and daddies love each other very much". The girl says "oh" and everyone sits in silence for a few minutes. Then she continues, "my friend Becky comes from Cleveland".

A few days ago I was petting Erik and suddenly noticed he was naked -- his collar was missing. In the 14+ years I've had him he's never before divested himself of his collar, so I'm mystified. A search of his usual hiding spots didn't turn it up, nor did a cursory look around Mary's house (where he spent last week). How weird! I bought a new collar at the grocery store (and even cut the obligatory bell off); since ordering a tag takes time I applied a Sharpie to the back of the newest rabies tag, there being enough room for a phone number. He's never gotten out, but of course it would be my luck that he would while sans tags, so better safe than sorry.

Speaking of cats, I found this story about Oscar the death-sensing cat interesting. I wonder what he's reacting to. (The article doesn't address the question of whether Oscar is the cause rather than the sensor.)

This story about a man whose house was condemned because of his books (link from

caryabend) makes me scratch my head. 3000 books isn't that many. What's really going on? A little googling didn't turn up more details.

This photographic evidence of a packrat made me laugh out loud. Fortunately, they don't condemn cars. :-)

I was recently asked to participate in a consumer focus group, and they had some questions up front. In the "oh, they so do not understand" category, they asked: "With about how many friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and family members do you communicate (via conversation, phone, email, etc.) on non-work-related topics on a regular basis, i.e. at least once a month?" The options were: <5; 5-9; 10-19; 20-29; 30-40; >40. At least once a month, and they top out at 40? 400 would be closer to the truth...

My article on building a yurt showed up on MetaFilter recently. That's kind of neat, though surprising. (I'm glad someone pointed it out to me; I wouldn't have known otherwise.) I feel like there must be better articles out there than mine, though I haven't gone looking lately.

At my vet's suggestion I called RadioCat to talk about treating Embla. We might be able to solve her hyper-thyroid problem permanently in the next couple months, which is faster than I had expected. My vet needs to send them some test results before they can talk to me more. (It would sure be convenient if the time she needs to be off the drugs coincided with Pennsic -- it would make the cat-sitting easier!)

This Despair-style poster for procrastination made me laugh out loud.

osewalrus posted a link to this "JPhone" video, which also made me laugh.

Monica

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Shabbat, NHC, and a few links

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