cellio | Entries tagged with fluff

This is why we can't make the bed in our house:

tip of Erik's tail emerging from covers He usually crawls under the covers at night and is often there in the morning. In the last few weeks he has started returning there immediately after his breakfast. (I don't understand how he breathes under there, but obviously he does.)

Our living room has a (currently-decorative) fireplace in the middle of one wall, with L-shaped radiators on either side. (In a bit of cleverness, somebody built window-seats over those radiators.) Erik in particular likes to lie in front of these radiators, using the L shape and body curve to maximize the thermal properties of the arrangement. Even though there are two radiators he and Baldur will sometimes fight over one of them; the one on the left seems preferable for reasons known only to cats.

When Erik lies along this radiator he always orients himself in the same way, facing into the room (instead of facing the fireplace). I've gently chided him that he needs to warm the other side sometimes, but you know how cats are about listening.

But now he seems to be taking my advice: for the last few days I have noticed him not changing orientation (that would still be wrong, apparently) but alternating radiators. Ok, that works too. :-)

(I really ought to get him a thermal bed as

alienor suggested.)

Stack Overflow has a candidate site for Q&A on Jewish topics. Stack Overflow takes what looks like a sound approach to launching new sites like this, waiting until enough people commit before launching. After all, if they can't attract good questions and good answers, no one will care. I committed.

What Level 3 v. Comcast says about the FCC's obsolescence is a good explanation of what is going on with throttling internet traffic (link, as with many on this topic, from osewalrus). goldsquare writes about why you should care.

Law and the Multiverse (now syndicated at law_multiverse) does fun legal analysis of superhero law. From their "about" page: "If there's one thing comic book nerds like doing it's over-thinking the smallest details. Here we turn our attention to the hypothetical legal ramifications of comic book tropes, characters, and powers. Just a few examples: Are mutants a protected class? Who foots the bill when a hero damages property while fighting a villain? What happens legally when a character comes back from the dead?" Thanks to anastasiav for pointing it out.

The first truly honest privacy policy sounds about right to me. Link from cahwyguy.

The semicolon wars discusses differences in programming languages and some of the religious wars that have been fought over them. Thanks to nancylebov for the link.

Thanks to brokengoose for pointing me to Kindle Feeder, which supports RSS feeds to the Kindle. Now, do any of you know how to get an RSS feed to cough up the entire article instead of just the first paragraph? If the publisher didn't set it up that way is there anything I can do about it?

Neat visualization #1: the scale of the universe, showing how big (and small) things are. Link from

filkerdave.

Ooh, pretty: when Planet Earth looks like art. Link from browngirl.

Overheard at work: "Every time a developer cries, a tester gets his horns".

Neat visualization #2, from a coworker: 200 counteries, 200 years, 4 minutes.

I had sometimes wondered what the point of bots was -- what does somebody get out of creating bogus LJ accounts just to add and remove friends? (At least when they post nonsense comments they might be testing security for when the spam comes later.) Bots on Livejournal explored helps answer that question. Link from alienor.

Graph paper on demand (other types too). Thanks, loosecanon; I can never find the right size graph paper lying around when I need it.

A handy tool: bandwidth meter, because the router reports theoretical, not actual, connection speed.

And a request for links (or other input): does anybody have midrash or torah commentary on the light of creation (meaning the light of that first day)? I have the couple passasges from B'reishit Rabbah quoted in Sefer Ha-Aggadah and I have the Rashi; any other biggies? I was asked to teach a segment of a class in a few days.

When I came home from work on erev Sukkot I was greeted by the plaintive wail of a UPS that had lost its will to live (thank you thank you thank you for not doing that 12 hours later!). There was nothing to be done then but unplug things. After Shabbat I replaced it; while I briefly considered just ordering a new battery, I noted that I was using all outlets on the UPS and all the wall outlets and was still resorting to a power squid, and on a recent power outage the UPS hadn't really held up very long. I was asking it to do too much; time for a bigger one. (And anyway, I didn't want my equipment to be unprotected for the several more days it would take for a new battery to arrive.)

This is as orderly as these things get: ( photo )

At the Giant Eagle pharmacy:

Me: Here's a prescription, and a gift card from Big Pharma that will pay for three months' worth. If I mail-order it I can get three months' worth at once; can you do that for me?

Her: I don't know; I'm just the front-desk flunky. Do you want to leave it and we'll give you as much as we're allowed to?

Me: Sure.

After I did my grocery shopping I returned.

Her: Sorry, we're only allowed to do one fill-up at a time.

Me: I understand. Have we completed this transaction, then?

Her: Um, yes?

Me: Will you take as given that I walked out through that exit and then came back in, or do I need to actually do it?

Her: Nice try, but you have to wait a month.

Oh well. I have until the end of the year to use the gift card.

Dani: So you can read on Shabbat; can you use a Kindle?

Me: No, because you have to manipulate the controls. It's like changing the channels on TV; technically you can watch it if it's on but you can't change the channel or volume. (Pause.) I suppose if, before Shabbat, you set in motion a smooth scroll at a readable pace, that would be like programming the lights. But it seems unworkable.

Dani: What about software that tracks your eye movements and turns the page at the right time?

Me: Seems like manipulation to me. Next you'll be bringing up sentient lightbulbs again.

Dani: How good does the programming have to be before your software qualifies as a servant?

I have no answer to that. Halacha geeks?

Dear Baldur,

It is wonderful -- nay, astonishing -- that you chose to get some exercise last night. If cats could sweat you probably would have worked one up. That's great for an elderly tubby tabby. So I really hesitate to say anything, but... that squeak-toy was not provided by any of the household humans, and you know how I feel about ambulatory toys, especially on the similarly-colored carpet where I might not see their remains. I'm sorry I took it away from you while it was still moving, but you know the rules. Yeah yeah, cycle of life and all that, but not where I'm going to have to deal with it, ok?

Dear squeak-toy,

I hope you made it. If you did, please warn all your murine friends that the cats who reside here are either too stupid or too self-centered to kill you quickly, and they are also too well-fed to eat you afterward, so your death would be in vain. We'll all be happier if you try another house. I nominate the guy up the block who never shovels his sidewalks; he's got a karma deficit.

This phone conversation with a customer (who I've met once) today made perfect sense at the time and only prompted the "wait, what?" reaction later:

Me: In your application, what's the difference between a Thingie and a Whatsis? [Names have been changed to protect the... oh, never mind.]

Him: Do you remember "I'm Just a Bill" from Schoolhouse Rock?

Me: Certainly.

Him: A Thingie is like the bill; when it's signed into law it becomes a Whatsis.

Me: But it looks like it can still change... you have executive orders?

Only later did it occur to me to wonder why he didn't just say a Thingie was a draft or a proposal and a Whatsis was the approved form... but it was more fun this way, even if it took me a while to then get that song out of my head. So now I share that earworm with some of you. :-)

A snippet from a recent meeting:

Incoming project manager: Release is March 14, code freeze February 14.
Me: You're releasing on a Sunday?
Another developer: The code freeze is on Valentine's Day?
Yet another developer: That's a Sunday too, so would you be here anyway?
Incoming PM: Are they always like this?

What got said:
Outgoing PM: usually.

What I should have said:
Only on weekdays.

Yesterday one of the two microwaves in the kitchen at work broke. It acquired a note taped to the front, with gradual accretions yesterday and today. Approximately, and in order:

Goes 'round and 'round but doesn't get hot
P1 major!
workaround: use other microwave
reproduced
bug [number] (was fictitious)
something might have fixed it; retest
triage: assigned to [name]
bug [number]

And lo and behold, that second bug number corresponded to an actual bug, filed against the processing engine of a package for modeling UI appliances, with the following subject: kernel-popping appliance is broken. The developer responsible for that code has already accepted it and acknowledged the priority; I can't wait to see his kernel patch.

Some days we still have that small-geeky-company feel. :-)

(Meanwhile, the ever-practical office manager ordered a new microwave.)

A recent mailing from my employer's department of reducing health-insurance costs (that's probably not their real name) offered some advice that seemed questionable to me. They suggested splitting pills -- not, they hastened to point out, that we should take half the dosage we need, but rather, we should get pills that are twice as strong as they need to be and then split them. They suggested that a stronger drug doesn't necessarily cost any (or much) more to fill, so you can fill your prescription half as often, saving you half the copay and them a lot on the balance. (Aside: what bright person decided that your cost, if insured, should be per month rather than per some volume? If I take a medicine twice as often as you do, why shouldn't I pay twice as much for it?)

I wonder how the pill-splitting scheme could actually be implemented legally and what doctor or pharmacist would go along with it. I find it hard to believe that a large company would advise its employees to commit insurance fraud (in a manner that's traceable), so there must be a way to do it, but I'm puzzled. (The company self-insures; maybe that's why it's ok?)

I was telling this to Dani last night, and commented that even if it's kosher I can't benefit from it for my prescriptions -- the medicine I take for glaucoma is in the form of eyedrops, and I don't know how to get double-sized drops. (Nor am I going to ask my ophthamologist to write a bogus prescription.) This, combined with some recent TV viewing, led us to wonder how big a drop is, anyway. We didn't have an internet connection to hand; Dani tried to work it out theoretically while I tried to work it out empirically. (Things often fall out that way with us.) A medicine that I take once a day (two drops) comes in a 2.5ml bottle and lasts about a month (maybe a little more). Viscosity matters, of course; this stuff is closer to water than to syrup. So I posited about 25 drops/ml for my medicine. (Google later suggested 20 drops/ml of water as an approximation.)

And that's when we turned our attention to the amount by which a character in the True Blood episode we'd just watched overdosed. The character had a quarter-ounce vial of an illegal substance (vampire blood) that he was supposed to take one drop of at a time. Wikipedia tells me that the viscosity of normal blood is about three times that of water. It has no data on vampire blood. Assuming (and I don't know if that's valid) that drop size is directly correlated with viscosity, this suggests that the character overdosed by a factor of approximately 46. Ouch. :-) (Yes, it did hurt.)

Ok, fine -- what have you done with your science education lately? :-)

There is a class of junk mail that tries earnestly to appear to be something Official and Important. You know the type -- the security paper with the three perforated strips around the edges that says something like "important tax documents" on the outside. These usually pique my curiosity enough to see what the pitch is, on the way to the recycle bin.

Today's (emblazoned with "economic stimulus" on the outside) informed me that according to public records, the mortgage I got on $date_we_bought_the_house at $interest_rate is way too high and they're here to help with a 5.25% fixed-rate loan (terms unspecified).

Dudes, we've refinanced twice since then. We're currently at 4.5%, so your 5.25% offer (which sounds high, actually) isn't very appealing -- something you'd presumably know if you checked those public records you were going on about. :-) And by way of further review, your perforated edges were poorly implemented, causing me to tear your special message while opening it. The other two mortgage pitches I've received so far this month were of much higher physical quality.

Another episode of "yes, we talk like this":

In a restaurant:
D: What's taking so long with my salad?
M: They're filleting your anchovies one by one.
D: They're catching my anchovies.
M: With little teeny fish-hooks.
D: They're not micro-fish.
M: Nobody does microfiche any more.

Road sign: "aggressive driving enforcement zone".
D: What does "aggressive" bind to?
M: "driving-enforcement" -- "you there, parked by the road -- shoo! shoo! This road is for driving!"

(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.)

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.

The most recent gathering of the Transarc doc group was Saturday afternoon at a home half a mile from mine. (While I don't remember the hosts from Transarc (I don't think we overlapped), I did share a Hebrew class with them once.) At one point a person I've worked with twice, and tried to recruit, asked me "are you still loving your job?". I gestured toward another person sitting there and asked "have you met my grand-boss"? I then explained that any answer I gave under the circumstances would be perceived as either untruthful or unwise, depending, so I couldn't answer that question just then. I also pointed out that another attendee now works for me, so she shouldn't ask her about it in front of me. :-)

It took a couple weeks (after making an online reservation), but I finally got my confirmation for the NHC summer institute (Jewish learning program). So now all I have to do is decide on an airport and make reservations. Trains do not go there efficiently. That's a pity; I would like to be able to take a train somewhere someday. Doing the "airborne sardine" thing is over-rated. (Hmm. I'm taking it as a given that no one else from the Pittsburgh area is going, but I should check. Driving could work with the right group. But there is no way I'm taking such a road trip myself.)

Erik saw my vet tonight for a followup after his visit to the emergency clinic last week. He is eating but (still) not as much as he should be. I am to give him fluids for a while. We are waiting for an appointment for a consultation with a specialist, who'll look at the ultrasound and advise on options, including surgery. Poor guy. He's active and otherwise happy near as I can tell, but he does seem to have a case of ADR (Ain't Doin' Right), and I hope they can figure out how to fix it soon.

It's a little disconcerting to realize that my cat has better health care than many people who can pay (but live in places where there's none to be bought).

What does "X% chance of rain tonight" mean? Any rain anywhere in the region at any time during the night? That X% of the region will be wet by morning? That the whole region will get rain for X% of the night? Inquiring minds want to know, and empirical evidence is decidedly lacking.

Short takes:

As rjlippincott says, sometimes a product name says everything you need to know. Moo Doo, indeed.

For SCA folks: jducoeur's rules of water-bearing nails some of the current bureaucracy square on the head. Go. Read.

This kitten pile from kittenbreak is adorable. Assuming that's one litter, I'm surprised by both the number and the uniformity.

When I did laundry a few days ago, I found a sock in the dryer that belongs to neither of us. I'm going to assume that no one broke into our house to do laundry, so that points strongly to another theory.

For the longest time I assumed that dryers ate socks (and sometimes expelled them as lint). But no! My dryer is apparently a sock transporter! But if so, the balance is way out of whack; I've lost many socks, but I believe this is the first deposit.

What kind of a repairman fixes that?

I learned today that there is a full-service gas station on my way to/from work. I didn't know we had any of those locally. It's been years (probably decades); what is the conventional tip?

As I pulled up to an intersction (all-way stop), someone from the cross street was backing through the intersection. After backing into the space in front of my car, he immediately popped into drive and went through the intersection. Whose turn was that, the cross-street or mine? :-)

I have occasionally noticed (because of tracking/RSS feeds or because I viewed the journals directly) posts to LJ that did not show up on my friends page. Is this happening to anyone else? I haven't detected a pattern yet.

Why does Hebrew have two words for "open" that differ only (apparently) in what objects they take? It's peh-kuf-chet when talking about eyes and ears, and peh-taf-chet for anything else.

While driving past the Office Depot in Monroeville, which had horrible service the last two times we were there (leading us to decide never to return):

Dani: They could improve their business a lot if they hired a second person.

Me: The number of cars in the parking lot is kind of disturbing.

Dani: Two would overwhelm them.

Me: Three; the employee parks out front to make it look busy. Hmm; maybe they buy junkers to populate the parking lot.

Dani: But then the employee would have to spend some of his time washing them off.

Me: And moving them around.

Dani: So they need to rotate them. Maybe they sell them at discounts with other purchaes.

Me: Buy three toner cartridges and get a free Saturn!

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.

Hey, Cambridge people:

Reference: this XKCD strip.

I'm told that the coordinates correspond to a park in your neighborhood, and that some folks are planning to be there. (I won't be, as I don't live anywhere near there, but I have readers who might want to know about this.)

I guess I shouldn't be surprised by bit rot. I've been at my current employer for several years, and our code base is Java (and now a little bit of C#). Today we interviewed a candidate whose background is primarily C with some C++. I was about to write the programming problem on the whiteboard, translated from Java to a language he'd be more comfortable in... and had forgotten too much syntax. Oops! I used to be proficient in both. I still know C++ well enough to work in (on existing code), and of course can still speak to it on a conceptual level, but I no longer know it well enough to generate from scratch. Bummer. I guess when you install Java you get garbage collection. :-)

(Just checked; still have rudimentary LISP. Good.)

Speaking of bit rot, from the "yes we really talk like this" department:

While discussing the too-old bread that was being disposed of:

Dani: Bread makes its greatest contribution to the ecology in the third week.

Me: No, bread makes its greatest contribution to medicine in the third week. It makes its contribution to ecology in the sixth week.

(In my defense, he bought the bread while I was out of town and it sat there neglected all this time.)

Speaking of food, yesterday was the last day at work for one of our more technical technical writers (not in my group), one of the primary implementors of our current XML-based system (DocBook-based). Another coworker got a cake, inscribed as follows: <colophon><para>We'll miss you Bill</para></colophon>. She did it herself; I can only imagine the things that could have gone wrong if phoning that in to the bakery. It went over well.

Last Sunday was Easter, so today was

ralphmelton and

lorimelton's annual bunny melt and high tea. It was quite a bit of fun, I met some new people (coworkers?), and the food was spectacular. (It's a pity no one thought to take pictures before we started eating.)

Lori suggested that this ritual meal needs a haggadah. I'll bet we can do something with that! This is the chocolate of affliction (leftovers at half price!); let all who are up to date on dental insurance come and eat. Ma nishtana: on most days we dip at most once but on this day we dip dozens of times; and on most days we eat our fruits plain but on this day we eat them with sugary goo. Four cups of tea is easy. I need to come up with something for the magid (the telling of the story). Err, that would require a story. :-)

In the evening some of us played a game that was new to me, Rum and Pirates. Each player (the game supports five) has a supply of pirates, which can be placed on the board to direct the active piece toward various special spaces. These spaces might provide victory points (or chances at same), or they might provide tools (such as money and free re-rolls of the die). The game is fun and not too complicated. According to the box it plays in 60-75 minutes; we took 90 but three of us had never played before. The game has a lot of parts (mostly chits), but -- unusual for such games these days -- it actually comes with a suitable plastic holder with the correct number of subdivisions. Most games give you a random assortment of compartments (or none at all) and you end up using zipper bags, which is a hassle if you have a lot of different types of pieces. Anyway, fun game; I'd definitely play again.

Overheard tonight: I have a question for the IRS. Can I depreciate the cost of purchasing my slaves and, if so, under what category? Is that a valid business expense?

Upon being told that slavery is illegal, he said that the IRS doesn't care; you also have to declare your income from selling crack. Fair enough.

(Still behind on LJ, by the way.)

Google Maps directions from Pittsburgh to London (not Ontario), courtesy of Dani. It's cool that they have a sense of humor, but I wonder about their optimization criteria. (Why Boston?) :-)

Monica

housekeeping

keeping warm

some reading material

link round-up (mostly)

need...more...power

yes we talk like this

notes to animals

an unexpected analogy

a conversation

hardware problem

medicine, drop size, and vampire blood

junk mail: a reply (snark)

conversations

light bits

Shabbat, NHC, and a few links

random bits

that's going to be a specialized repair

some light questions

a conversational snippet

link round-up

Canbridge (MA): XKCD meetup Sunday

random bits

bunny melt

tax humor

laugh of the day

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