Entries tagged with misc

Entry tags:

misc

random bits

I thought I knew what "big hair" meant, until I saw a case today that violated all of my expectations. I didn't know it was even possible for one head to grow enough for what I saw, though it might have had some help because the whole assembly moved as a unit in the wind. Probably not shellac, though.

Some of the in-laws are coming to visit this weekend. It'll be nice to have them here (we go there far more often than they come here). They are disconcerted by the fact that dinner out on Saturday will be pretty late, but that's June for you. I hope the weather is good so we can take them to the Three Rivers Arts Festival, which starts this weekend and frequently causes rain. (Ok, ok... correlation does not equal causality, blah blah blah... but I know what I've seen. :-) )

I thought lilacs were supposed to bloom for more than a week. Bummer. On the other hand, the purple dutch iris (I think that's what they are) are lovely, and they seem to have a longer lifespan. And I finally have lamb's wool again. (The gardener apparently didn't realize that it's a perennial when he blew away the remnants of last year's batch.) Mind, I'd never have hired a gardener on my own -- I like flowers and hate gardening but it somehow feels unduly aristocratic to have a gardener -- but we were definitely going to hire someone to do the annoying maintenance (mowing, hedge-trimming, leaf-raking, etc), and it turns out not to be much more to have him tend the flowers too.

We got a card in the mail from a purveyor of central air conditioning that said, effectively, "if you've been told your house can't have central AC, talk to us". We have so we will. Their approach seems to involve the mini-ducts; we tried to get that but they still needed to run a large duct the length of the house and our attic couldn't support that. So I won't be surprised if the same thing happens again, but maybe these guys have a different approach. (Aside to spammers and telemarketer: notice that a solicitation via physical mail worked, while spamming or calling flips the bozo bit.)

Entry tags:

misc

one of these classmates is not like the others

Folks on the mailing list for the Sh'liach K'hilah program have been discussing travel plans for this July's session (mainly, I think, so that those who are flying can coordinate airport transport). One person posted that he'll be flying his personal plane.

His what? *boggle*

Entry tags:

short takes

I have half a large cantaloupe and more than enough fruit salad. So far, it appears my other options are blender drinks and sweet cold soups. I guess that shouldn't surprise me too much, but I wonder if I can do better.

Today's mail brought a membership appeal from "Toys for Tots Christmas Club". Oh, let me count the ways in which they have missed their mark... no, on second thought, let's not. :-)

I've spent the last month being a registered Democrat for tax purposes. (I'll fix it after the mayoral election -- err, "primary".) It should be fascinating to see what that does to the makeup of my junk mail.

A question occurred to me while contemplating a conference in England that ends on a Friday (not that I'm expecting to be allowed to go, but): If I get onto a west-bound plane shortly before Shabbat, and at no point during the trip am I in an area where it is already Shabbat, is that kosher? (It might not be smart, of course, as one delayed connection can ruin one's whole day.)

Note to anonymous coworker: if you only get the error after you've edited the code, and you can't produce it from the checked-in version, it is not my bug. :-)

Entry tags:

misc

nifty art

Last night, at my CEO's insistence, I went to see a small exhibit of Patrick Hughes' 3-D art in Shadyside. It's quite spiffy (and hard to describe). He plays with perception so, for example, you'll be looking at a painting of a room with several perpendicular surfaces reaching out toward you (e.g. bookcases on a wall, then you see the corner and a plain wall after a 90-degree turn; you're looking point-on). As you move your head from side to side the objects (the walls, in this case) seem to move -- except that they're moving in the wrong direction. Imagine that you're looking point-on at bookcases on the left and a plain wall on the right. You move your head toward the right, which would cause you to see more plain wall in a real room. You instead see the section rotate and show you more bookcase. Very wacky. I was told that there's some vertical action too, but I was unable to see it.

There is, of course, a trick to it (and as a warning, the web site I linked to explains the trick). If you're thinking of going, I suggest that you not read it first. Go and appreciate the art and then look at how it's done.

The current show has six paintings (hey, I said it was small). Three or four (I forget) are "scene" paintings like I described; the other two are collections of objects (e.g. a box of Brillo pads next to a carton of orange juice next to...). The scenes worked much better for me; while everything produced the visual effect, I found that I really don't care about wacky pseudo-rotation of a box of Brillo pads next to a carton of orange juice. It was much more interesting to watch bookcases or clouds or bits of a garden dance across my view.

The paintings had price tags next to them, so I assume that in theory you could buy them, but at the posted prices I don't think anyone in my circle of friends will be buying. Actually, even if all my friends and I pooled our discretionary money for a single purchase we probably wouldn't be buying. But looking's free. :-) (I also found myself thinking -- incorrectly, I'm sure -- "hey, I grok the trick; I could do this".)

The show is at the Mendelson gallery, 5742 Ellsworth. Caveat: the 5700 block of Ellsworth is more than one block long; I thought I had missed it when I got to a corner while walking up from 5705 or so. I guess Shadyside is weird. Anyway, it's a tiny little gallery in a house (or what looks like a house), so don't worry if you seem to be leaving the main business district.

I'm not sure what their hours are -- no weeknights without appointments, I'm told (our company had an appointment last night), but I believe they're open on weekend afternoons. I think the show is here for another week or so.

Entry tags:

short takes

I'm reading torah tomorrow, and my portion starts in the middle of a paragraph. Finding the beginning is usually a challenge in that case (remember: no punctuation), so I asked if I could look at it after minyan last night so I wouldn't be fumbling with it at the last minute. My portion begins a new column -- first word of the column is my first word. From a navigational perspective it doesn't get much easier than that!

velveteenrabbi wrote an interesting article, Blog is my Copilot: The Rise of Religion Online. (It's fairly short.) I had not previously heard the term "godblog".

This morning I found myself behind a police car that made several turns without signalling. While it's naive, I prefer law-abiding behavior from those who enforce the law.

A woman who had a baby at a gas station was driving herself to the hospital immediately after when the police stopped her. The part that got my attention was that after they cleared up the traffic stop, "Officers sent Coleman on and let the hospital know she was coming". Um, isn't this the point where many officers would have offered to drive her there? *boggle*

April Fool's comment from mortuus: "may your pranks be merry and may your victims not sue". Ah, life in America. :-)

I was reminded recently of some LISP limericks that I saw, by either Guy Steele or Scott Fahlman I think, in the early 80s. They were limericks in code, though some creativity in reading them was called for. This was long before I had a personal hard drive on which to lose such stuff, and Google isn't turning them up for me. Does this ring any bells with anyone else?

Entry tags:

misc

short takes

This line from a restaurant review made me laugh: "I fear that waiting for them to hunt and trap the duck entree may be coloring my review." (

tangerinpenguin)

CNN reported that a court had accidentally subpoenaed a dog to testify in court. (The inmate wrote a letter to said dog, which is where the lead came from. Look, I don't make this stuff up.) A court official, upon learning of the error (by having the dog show up and be barred from the building), reported that the dog seemed very friendly and probably "would have been a cooperative witness".

Today at work we were given a t-shirt for the new product launch. It includes some code snippets in the background. My first reaction was to wonder if the code went through code review and intellectual-property review. :-) (Personally, I think that if a t-shirt's worth of code gives away your trade secrets, they probably weren't secrets worth protecting anyway. But this code was in no danger of doing that.)

We had a party to celebrate said release this afternoon. The venue had several pool tables (pool? billiards? is there a difference, or is that just a US-versus-UK thing?). Sadly, theoretical knowledge of how objects move (in a frictionless universe, natch) does little to impart actual skill in propelling a cue stick in the desired way. So I stink at the game, but I still enjoy trying.

Conversation with a 911 dispatcher yesterday:
Me: I'm calling to report a disabled vehicle blocking traffic.
Him: Where?
Me: [street] at [street], eastbound.
Him: (pause) You're calling from Pittsburgh, right?
Me: Um, yeah. In [neighborhood].
Him: Ok. It's just that you said "eastbound".

(People around here seem to have a lot of trouble with compass directions. Sure, part of it is that the roads aren't exactly straight, but still, if you describe a place as being, e.g., on the north side of the street, likely as not someone will ask which side that is.)

Entry tags:

language,
misc

morning short takes

Never try to visit a car wash on the first nice day in March. I'm glad I wasn't blocked in by the time I could read the sign a few cars up that said "45-minute wait from this point". (Well, the sign wasn't punctuated correctly, but I'm used to hyphen neglect.) I'm willing to live with filth for a little longer. :-)

I saw an odd traffic-light failure this morning. At one intersection (where visibility isn't the greatest to begin with), the red lights were out -- all of the ones I could see. But not the greens. They should kill the light entirely until they fix that; at least that way everyone gets a clue that something might be wrong, and maybe most drivers even know to treat the intersection as an all-way stop in that case.

Someone on the street asked me what time it was and I said "20 after 9". If it had been five minutes earlier it would have been natural to say "quarter after", but had I said "third after" he would have looked at me cross-eyed. I wonder what led to "quarter" and "half" being acceptable but not other simple divisions.

(I am reminded of a book -- I forget which -- that I read as a child, where the child protaganist thought that "quarter past" meant 25 minutes past, because there are 25 cents in a quarter-dollar.)

Entry tags:

short takes

I moderate a mailing list and reject a lot of posts for being off-topic in various ways. Every now and then I'm tempted to have "open the flood-gates day", just to show subscribers what I'm up against, but I never do it. :-)

Dani's '99 Saturn has failed him once too often (and most recently -- and most frequently -- with a Heisenbug), so he's now car shopping. He's at the "read everything Consumer Reports and Edmunds has to say about cars I've heard of" stage. Well, maybe not everything he's heard of, but you know how it works. I wonder what he'll end up with. He knows to stay away from VW :-), and it would be hard to find a new car that'll treat him as badly as his current one has.

Erik gets daily medicine, which I mix up in canned food. He's absolutely loving this, especially when the canned food is fish. A consequence of this is that while he's eating this, I let Baldur and Embla share the bits that remain on the spoon. So, more evidence that Baldur is not one of the brighter cats around: he will push Embla aside so that he can get better access to the spoon, and then lick such that he pushes most of the food bits off onto the floor. Embla, observing this, doesn't even try to maintain a claim on the spoon; she gobbles up the dropped bits while Baldur gets the smaller bits that don't drop. Since Baldur is overweight, I see no need to interfere with this dynamic.

Quote of the day: "I bought an axe for Valentine's Day. The checkout clerk at Canadian Tire, and the guy in line behind me, were quite amused at the implications... (Hey, a girl's gotta right to keep herself warm, right?)" -- aliza250

Random thought while browsing the news: Michael Jackson has got to be one of the ugliest white girls I've seen in a while.

Entry tags:

misc

clothing rave

nsingman asked for a rant or rave (he didn't specify) about bras. Ok, I can do that. :-)

( Read more... )

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interviewed by patsmor

I think I have given questions to everyone who asked (except the person who asked for a second round; I'll get to you), and that I have now answered all pending questions. If I missed someone either way, please let me know! My LJ mail has been a little wacky at times over the last few days, so I may have missed something. If you still want to jump in, speak up.

( faults, living arrangements, SCA, love )

Entry tags:

interviewed by profane_stencil

I think I've now gotten questions to everyone who's asked for some so far. Please let me know if I'm wrong about that.

( death, Catholicism, SCA, meeting people, job )

Here's how it works:

If you want to be interviewed, leave a comment saying so.
I will respond, asking you five questions.
You'll update your journal with my five questions and your five answers.
You'll include this explanation.
You'll ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed.

Entry tags:

computers,
misc

short takes

A recent news article about a spate of traffic violations (with police lying in wait to write tickets) mentioned that the vehicle code requires drivers to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks or at intersections (even without crosswalks). I guess a different law covers failure to yield to jaywalkers.

I was amused by this indirect response to my post about probability.

I have a new(er) machine at work, which I'm in the process of configuring. (This always takes longer than you expect. Today's main hassle was making cygwin and ant play nicely with each other, which took a while to diagnose.) Anyway, after bringing the OS (Win2k) up to date and installing a bunch of software, and before running any web browsers, I ran Spybot Search and Destroy. It found three pieces of spyware. Sheesh!

The graphics card on my new machine is fuzzy -- or rather, its output is fuzzy (though for all I know the card is too). I have the latest driver, and the fonts are still harder to read than on my old machine, with all parameters and the monitor identical. This must get fixed before my eyes rebel. I wonder if there is a way to choose an appropriate graphics card, or if I'd just be shooting in the dark. But aside from that, the machine is definitely a win -- I timed a process that used to take 3-4 minutes at 40 seconds today.

December already? Where's that coem from? :-) We have no free Saturday nights in December: gaming, then my company's party, then Dani's company party (early) and a friends' party we wouldn't miss for anything, and then a family visit. (And then more gaming on new year's day, but that's not technically December.)

Entry tags:

weekend bits

There's nothing quite like a fire truck parked outside your garage to get your attention upon looking out the back window. (Err, is there a problem on our property we're not aware of?) Near as I can tell, the bus stopped between the fire truck and the ambulance had caught fire. There was lots of milling about but no haste, so I assume no one was badly hurt.

This has been mostly a quiet weekend, which I'm not complaining about. :-) We did Thanksgiving with my family on Thursday, and we've been puttering around the house the rest of the weekend. (We'll be headed out to dinner with friends tonight.) Friday afternoon I cooked a brisket for Shabbat because, for once, I actually had the 3.5 hours available to tend it. (I'll freeze the rest -- there's no point in making only a little brisket.) It was quite tasty, and very easy. Saturday for lunch we had leftover turkey et al.

Odd Thanksgiving nomenclature: lots of people apparently call the bread stuff "stuffing" if it's in the bird and "dressing" if it's in a pan, but I learned it all as "stuffing". magid refers to them as endostuffing and exostuffing, which I think sums it up perfectly.

Services Friday and Saturday had lighter attendance than usual but not as light as I had expected, and Saturday morning the 94-year-old woman who asked if she could chant halftarah brought several family members along. She did a good job (especially considering the challenge) but felt that she had made mistakes. I'm glad she gave it a try, though, and lots of people had kind words for her.

We almost had the opposite end of the spectrum at the same service -- a recent bar mitzvah who wants to keep up his involvement and was going to chant torah -- but family holiday complications kept him away. He'll chant next week instead. The confluence of young and old would have been nifty if it had worked out.

Real Live Preacher (preachermanfeed) recently published a book collecting some of his blog-published essays and a few new ones. It's an interesting read. I wonder if that will catch on -- dead-tree compilations of the best blog entries, either from a single author or in topic-based compilations. While entries like this present one are just "daily life" stuff not really interesting to most people, some entries out there are more like essays and, I imagine, the same writing considerations go into them whether they're for blogs or print. Compilations of essays are nothing new; there's just a new venue for building up a following prior to a collection.

Entry tags:

misc

sign of the times

I'm applying for a passport (because I might want one in the next decade and I want to beat next year's RFID chips if I can). I just took a closer look at my birth certificate than I had previously and noticed something.

The form records, of course, information about my parents. For both, it has name, age, state of birth, and race. For my mother, it adds maiden name. And for my father, it adds occupation and industry.

That's right: this form has no place in which to record the mother's occupation. It's not that it's blank; the spot doesn't exist.

(What is it with the governmnet's interest in occupation, anyway? I guess on tax forms it acts as a really primitive sanity check, and maybe my occupation affects whether they'll grant me the passport. But it's not like they could have told my parents "nope, you're not allowed to give birth because dad's an aircraft engineer". Why do they even care?)

Entry tags:

weekend bits

Today's Halloween, so I've been assuming that costumed children (and some non-costumed non-children, based on past years) would show up on our porch seeking sugary tribute. I saw nothing in the newspaper about scheduled hours for this, so I applied the power of Google. I wonder whether this means that the web really is pervasive, or if people who have kids (or otherwise care) have alternative sources of information. Silly me; I just naturally assumed that this was one of the jobs of a local newspaper.

I did buy some sugary tribute; we'll see how many people show up before we leave for dinner with friends. We didn't get a lot of people last year or the year before; it's possible we have a a reputation as the house that hands out weird stuff due to Dani handing out comic books for a few years in the past. On the other hand, we might just live on a low-payoff street; the houses are more spread out than a few blocks over and I'm not sure how many neighbors participate.

This afternoon we visited with my parents (and sister and one of her kids, though said kid preferred the computer's company to ours). My parents are taking the death of their dog (about a month ago) pretty hard. Thor was a 14-year-old golden retriever; they'd had him since he was 2.

They had him cremated, and my mother showed us the urn that contains his ashes. I'll have to look that one up in Miss Manners. I mean, what's the proper response? "It's a pretty urn"? "I'm so sorry" (but I said that already)? Silence? (Oh, and a wise move: they seal the urn, so accidents that don't involve breakage are harmless.)

I knew that dogs could be trained to do a lot, but I was surprised to read about the assistance animal that called 911, barked persistently into the receiver until the folks on the other end reacted, and then unlocked the front door for the ambulance crew when his owner fell.

We had a visitor Shabbat afternoon, and the three of us played games for a few hours. Aha -- that's a good way to spend (part of) long Shabbat afternoons! (I can't just read all day -- I get headaches from eyestrain.) Of course, with the change of seasons and now the time change, long Shabbat afternoons are going to be much less long for a while. But I must remember this come summer and try to arrange for it on a regular basis. Besides, I like having company and I have friends who like to play games, so what's not to like in this plan?

Friday night at services someone was wearing a Kerry/Edwards button -- transliterated into Hebrew. Some words should just not be transliterated into Hebrew. "Edwards" is one of them. Boy did that look funny.

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interviewed by vonstrassburg

( Read more... )

Entry tags:

short takes

I picked up a bit of random torah commentary this Shabbat that was new to me. After the ark landed, Noach first sent out a raven, which flew "to and fro". Later he sent out a dove (more than once), and eventually that dove found dry land. So what's up with the raven? Well, this is where "the flood is not a nice story" comes in. Ravens are carnivores. Everything previously living on the earth just got wiped out. Um. Yeah. That makes sense. So the raven was chowing down at the buffet table, but this didn't help the folks in the ark.

This analysis of the anti-gay movement resonated for me (post by xiphias).

Seen in Giant Eagle: someone checking out with a carton of cigarettes and a bottle of mouthwash. Um, dude, that's not going to help.

For something lighter, go read this entry from grifyn:

V: "You requested a PONY."
I did.
V: "On the supply report."
You told us to list what we needed.

Entry tags:

car,
misc

random bits

On Thursday while parking near Kosher Mart I noticed the license plate on the car in front of me: "LCH LCHA". Cute. :-) ("Lech L'cha" is Hebrew for, roughly, "go forth from here"; it's also the name of one of the torah portions. I wonder if the person was playing on this being for a car, or if it was his bar-mitzvah portion, or what?)

A coworker asked me if I still had the old phone number of a past employer. (This number would no longer be valid, but some paperwork required it anyway.) I have whole clusters of brain cells that I'd much rather have doing something useful, but instead they hold onto junk like that. So I gave her what I thought was the right number, and then I realized we could use the Web Wayback Machine to check. Yup, found an old web site from 1999 or thereabouts that had contact information, and I was right. And my coworker learned about the Wayback Machine. I was pleased that I could serve all of this up so quickly.

Someone asked me for a jump-start yesterday, and I realized I have not previously popped the hood on this car. (Remember, it's new.) The inside release turned out to be hard to find (it was nicely "out of the way"). The external release that you need to finish the job was also not obvious. And I was reminded during all this just how bad the documentation is. VW: nice cars; sucky manuals (based on one data point). The "manual" is actually a little notebook with a dozen different manuals, no overall TOC/index, and way more paper than is needed because many pieces of information are repeated numerous times. That's no way to write a doc set!

And now... Shabbat beckons.

Entry tags:

misc

private space flight

Woohoo! They did it!

(Well, ok, took the first big step. But private commercial space flight may now be a reality in my lifetime.)

Entry tags:

random bits

Turnout for choir practice has been small for a while, and for a few months I've been the only person on my part. I'm actually enjoying that; I think I'm doing a good job with it, and it's easier for me to blend with the rest of my section. :-) (Sadly, we just lost

ommkarja, a fine alto, to the west coast. Hope your drive out is going smoothly!)

Sunday night we joined a crowd at Joe's Basement for dinner to celebrate Ralph's birthday. Mmm, good food. It turns out they no longer take reservations for the Pope Room and our party was too large anyway. I forgot to hunt it down so I could find out what the fuss is about. Given the level of kitsch in the rest of the place, it's got to be pretty impressive!

Sunday morning I was beginning to think thoughts about window air conditioners. Sunday afternoon the temperature dropped more than 20 degrees in one hour. Today brought frost warnings. Ahem. Someone failed to read the spec; this is not normative spring weather.

Someone I know just returned from an assignment in the middle east, where he encountered a peculiar weather phenomenon. He observed that there was a lot of dust in the air and that there was impending rain, and that the latter should take of the former. Well, yes and no -- it rained mud. :-)

I now have evidence that my intermittent "monitor" problems are actually graphics-card problems. I'm guessing the connection is a little loose, because I have found a reliable place on the side of the CPU case where a gentle rap fixes the problem. It's nice to know that the monitor I just replaced (for other reasons) is still in good shape, though. Eventually I'll sweet-talk Dani into carrying it down two flights of stairs and it can replace the definitely-flaky, smaller monitor on the file server. We have VNC running on it so it's not that big a deal, but still...