Monica

What'll they think of next? Google is leveraging its cloud-based technologies in helpful new ways. Maybe they'll do Seattle next.

Me: What do we need, that is available from Amazon, that costs $4.02?
Dani: Is this what's known as a first-world problem?
Me: Not the most egregious I've seen, but yeah.

Free shipping: modifying buyer behavior since...whenever they started that. But it works because of their enormous catalogue; you can find something to fill out an order. (For personal orders this is pretty much never a problem, but I was buying house stuff and thus using shared money.)

(This post is a minimal test of Dreamwidth's Markdown support. Let's see what happens.)

(Much re-arrangement of dishwasher.)
"What are you doing in there?"
"Optimizing."
"Oh, I thought you were just trying to make things fit."
"That's easy, but then everything wouldn't get clean."
"Then what you are doing is not 'optimizing'. Optimizing means taking something that works and making it better (technically, as good as it can be). Making it 'not broken' is not the same thing."

"I should run it on pot-scrubber mode."
"There are no pots in there."
"And when it's done there will be no dirty pots."

Not said by either of us, but it would fit:

"I don't suffer from overthinking, I enjoy it. Depending on how you define enjoy. And overthinking." (source)

These are some pictures from the Roaming Unicorn. Some silliness here, and more to come later in the week I suspect.

( Stack Exchange Roaming Unicorn )

Finally (for now), the Ladycorn joined me at choir practice, where our director, desperate to get us to pay more attention to our hypothetical audience, began conducting with her -- and I was laughing too hard to think about taking a picture. Oh well; some things will just have to be left to memory and imagination.

Apparently, what I do while in the bathroom is of intense interest to the cats: no matter where they were before (and whether they were sleeping), lately when I open the door they are both sitting just outside it attentively.

However, this doesn't work if I need to collect one for medicine or a trip to the vet.

Why their ability to read minds in the latter case does not assuage their curiosity in the former will apparently remain a mystery.

A few days ago Dani told me that his company, for no particularly-obvious reason, was replacing all their office chairs, with the old ones to be hauled away...somewhere. Some of his coworkers, noting that their current chairs were in fine shape, asked if they could salvage them. The powers that be said ok, anything with a "reserved" sign on it wouldn't be hauled away.

A few minutes after telling me this he asked "do you want to have brunch Sunday at (a downtown restaurant)?". Sure, I said. A moment later I asked "are we fetching office furniture?" Why yes, he said.

So um, I said, if they were likely to have any spares... "I reserved two", he said. Nice.

So I have now upgraded my desk chair (not my computer chair, which is different), finally deprecating the desk chair I obtained from the Perq Systems fire sale for, I think, a dollar. Dani's company isn't dead, so I have hopes that this chair will do at least as well as its predecessor.

(I'm actually very particular about my computer chair(s), in contrast. When I started with my current employer I spent one day with my assigned chair and then went out and bought my own (which, to pass muster with the furniture police, had to match color). All our chairs have stickers on them with their designated locations (because sometimes people "borrow" chairs for meetings and aren't so good about returning them); mine has an additional sticker, "property of (me)", and has never been absconded with.)

We went to alaricmacconnal's and Elsbeth's yesterday for a New Year's Day party, which meant more gaming. I had fun playing more Dixit (blackpaladin, which expansions were in there?), and Dani played Constantinopolis, a resource-management game that sounded similar to Puerto Rico but is twice as long (or thereabouts). I haven't played it yet.

2013 was getting off to a great start but then I had to go back to work. Powerball, you have failed me. :-) (Ok, I've never actually bought my own lottery ticket, but when a group is forming at work I always buy in because I'd sure feel stupid if I didn't and half the company won buckets of money and left.)

Resolution? 1280x1024, but maybe I'll get a new monitor this year. (I think it was merle_ who inspired that idea.) Though I'd rather keep the aspect ratio I have now (i.e. I'm not so thrilled with the widescreen monitors that are all the rage these days).

Orlando is currently chasing his tail. I thought that was a dog thing. (He's got one white pixel on the end of it, but I don't think it's that in particular that he's chasing.) More generally, he and Giovanni seem to be settling in, though I still can't pick either up for more than a few seconds and I had only 50% success on last week's vet visit. Giovanni has gained a pound in the last month, so I guess Orlando isn't being as pushy about the food dishes as I thought.

Netflix only gives you about a week's notice when something is going to disappear from their streaming service. Last week I noticed that Farscape, which had been languishing there for a while, was slated to disappear, so I watched the first eight episodes to decide if I want to queue up DVDs. It looked to me like interesting characters and underwhelming plots, but I'm mindful that some good shows (like B5) took a while to settle in. To those who've seen it: does it get better?

Apparently I can't post comments on LJ tonight, so some of you will probably get some belated comments when that changes. Let's see if I can post an entry.

There was a Halloween pot-luck at work today. Late last week we had a spectacular fridge purge -- things years past their expiration dates and quite a few "science experiments" and containers of green fuzzy...something. These ideas seemed like they should go together, so in a then-locked entry (to maintain the surprise) I asked for suggestions. Thanks to everybody who helped! That entry is now public.

I opted for "cottage-cheese salad way past its sell-by date" as closest to the fridge theme, though several other suggestions nicely fit a "green and/or fuzzy" theme in other ways. (I went for this one because it is clearly abnormal in its green-ness, unlike, say, gaucamole or kiwi.) You can't see it in the picture below, but I altered the sell-by date on the container from 2011 to 2001 -- turning the "1" into a "0" was the only thing I could do after failing to remove the existing ink with chemicals I had on hand. We have a rule that things in the fridge need to be labeled, so this morning I browsed our alumni wiki page to decide on a long-gone coworker to implicate. Ex-coworker, if you're out there, it was all in fun. :-)

The treatment was...evocative, so much so that for a while nobody else ate it. Eventually people got brave. Other offerings included cake with "glass shards" (made from sugar), a couple variations on fingers, a fruit salad with eyeballs, a greenish brain with red highlights (labeled as zombie food), and several comparatively-normal items. I consider it a success.

There is a post-script. A coworker pointed out that the person I implicated didn't work there in 2001. I knew that, but any food actually from 2001 would not have survived the office move in 2005. I was one of the people who prepared the fridges for that move; I know. So I had to choose among inaccuracies -- I could support a 2001 fridge deposit or a fridge deposit that could have occurred in our current location, and opted for the latter. If I'd been able to edit the date more effectively I could have done both. I don't think anybody was there in 2001, still there after the move, and gone soon after. Yes, I did over-think this. :-)

( photo )

I interrupt preparations for the class I'm teaching next week at the music and dance collegium (gosh, I hope I have this calibrated right...) to pass along some random short bits.

Dear Netflix: I appreciate the convenience of your recent change to treat an entire TV series as one unit in the streaming queue, instead of one season at a time like before. However, in doing so you have taken away the ability to rate individual seasons of shows, which is valuable data. It also makes me wonder, when you recommend things to me based on my ratings, if you are giving all ratings the same weight -- 200 hours of a long-running TV show should maybe count differently than a two-hour movie. Just sayin'.

These photos by Doug Welch are stunning. Link from thnidu.

How Pixar fosters collective creativity was an interesting read on fostering a good workplace. Link from nancylebov.

Speaking of the workplace, I enjoyed reading how to run your career like a gentlewoman and several other articles I found there by following links. Link from _subdivisions_.

Rube Goldberg meets J.S. Bach, from several people. Probably fake, but it amused me anyway. (This is a three-minute Japanese commercial. Do commercials that long run on TV, or would this have been theatrical, or what?)

Speaking of ads, in advance of our SCA group's election for a new baron and baroness today, the current baron sent around a pointer to this video about an upcoming British referendum on voting systems. Well-done! (Of course, I agree with both the system and the species they advocate. :-) ) I wish we had preference ballots in the US.

A while back a coworker pointed me to how to make a hamentashen Sierpinski triangle. Ok ok, some of my browser tabs have established roots; Purim was a while ago. But it's still funny, and I may have to make that next year.

Speaking of geeky Jewish food, a fellow congregant pointed me to The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals. which looks like fun. I've certainly found myself in that kind of conversation at times (e.g. is unicorn kosher? well, is it a goat (medieval) or a horse (Disney)?). Some of you have too, I know. :-)

dr_zrfq passed on this article about a dispute between a church and a bar. Nothing special about that, you say? In this case the church members prayed to block it, the bar was struck by lightning, the bar owner sued, and the church denied responsibility. I love the judge's comment on the case: “I don't know how I’m going to decide this, but as it appears from the paperwork, we have a bar owner who believes in the power of prayer, and an entire church congregation that does not.”

47 seconds of cuteness: elk calf playing in water, from shalmestere.

I don't remember where I found the link to these t-shirts, but there are some cute ones there.

At work, two coworkers were standing near me discussing a problem of reconciling divergent data in a system I'm helping with. Coworker 2 said "draw me a picture". On a whiteboard, coworker 1 wrote "location 1" and drew a laptop symbol, then wrote "location 2" and drew another laptop, then drew a squiggly line between them, then drew something evocative of a bicycle.

Coworker 2 asked "what's that?". I replied: "the transport layer". (Yes, really. Customer has no network availability and multiple locations.) He was enlightened about the problem of potential data stale-ness, and did not ask me what protocol is used. :-) (BCP - bicycle communication protocol?)

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

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.)

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?

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 )