cellio | Entries tagged with quotes

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.

CBS relented and renewed Jericho. Yay! This is a good show that, like other serials, was hurt by a mid-season hiatus. I don't understand why 24 seems to be the only prime-time show whose producers get this: run your show straight through if it's a continuing story.

A school refused to give diplomas to students for whom people cheered at graduation. They have since rescinded this decision. The whole thing has me asking WTF? How does it make sense to punish the students, who were not the ones violating the decorum of the event? Heck, given the rivalries that high schools tend to, did anyone consider that the cheering might have been a hostile move (to get the diplomas held back)?

This made me laugh out loud: "Ubuntu" is an ancient african word. It means "I can't configure debian." --zeylisse on slashdot.org, repeated by

brokengoose.

What does your cat do all day while you're away? Try a cat cam. I want one. No, three. Ok, two; I only need so many pictures taken by a sleeping Baldur.

Speaking of cats, I got Embla's test results last night. We've done too good a job on treating the hyperthyroidism. Her T4 this week was 0.5 (down from 5.6 two months ago and 70 (!) three months ago). I understood the goal to be "under 4", but the vet really meant "between 1 and 4". So we're backing off the medicine just slightly.

A day late for the anniversary, but

kmelion reposted this (English translation of a) transcript of a tape made during the six-day war, upon entering Jerusalem.

Seen in a sig file: "Don't sweat the small stuff. Gnomes, for example."

For a mere $26/pound, you can get custom M&Ms printed with your messages. I don't know whether to be amused or disturbed. :-)

This is a great litttle hack. Don't worry if you can't read the text (I can't either); the pictures are the important part.

merle_ reports a distubing level of waste in disposing of counterfeit products and proposes a sensible solution.

I received email from someone at my synagogue today saying "thanks for serving on the nominating committee (for the board); our first meeting will be...". I'm on the nominating committee? Ok -- happy to do it, but I think someone forgot to make a phone call. :-) (I've been on the nominating committee twice before, so I know how it's worked in the past. I actually consider this to be a pretty important position, because the congregation just votes in the nominees unless something goes Really Wrong, which I haven't seen.)

(The web interface is being wacky. If you saw a mis-formmatted post from me -- I didn't do it. Let's try again.)

Domain names to avoid, from dagonell.

This conversation is funny in that oddly-familiar way (from xiphias).

Quote of the day from dglenn: "The country is run by extremists, because moderates have shit to do." --John Stewart, on The Daily Show. (Meta: I tried to email this to myself and the filter at work blocked due to profanity.)

Last night Dani was explaining the cult of Eye of Argon, an astonishingly-bad SF story, to a friend. Naturally there is a Wikipedia entry. Dani called my attention to the following comment about the author from there: "a malaprop genius, a McGonagall of prose with an eerie gift for choosing the wrong word and then misapplying it".

The new furnace has a display with buttons and a numeric read-out... and no user documentation (but lots of installation documentation). How odd. Fortunately, furnaces usually don't require a lot of user intervention: turn on in October and off in April (or whenever, adjusted for your locale).

Well, we had a few good sukkah nights before rain and cold ended that. And note to future self: the week of Sukkot has the longest morning (weekday) services of the year; anything you can do to expedite (without rushing) will be looked upon with favor by the congregation.

I heard a great comeback the other day. Someone had moved in with an SO before marriage, and a holier-than-thou relative was giving her grief. The relative reported that she'd learned about this sinful situation from some mutual acquaintance who also disapproves, and what did she have to say for herself? Her response: "Were you... gossiping?"

Sukkot morning there was a bar mitzvah. I wasn't thrilled to hear that; usually that means the bar-mitzvah family takes over and the regular congregation feels pushed off to the side. So that's not a nice thing to do at a service that is the only option for the greater congregation. (On most Shabbatot we have two services, the one the regulars go to and the bar-mitzvah service that the family pretty much owns. I wish it weren't that way, but it is. On holidays we don't do that, though; there's one service.) However, it worked out; the bar mitzvah was very good and gave one of the best talks I've heard from a kid so far. I hope that was intentional -- that a particularly promising student was given the honor of having his bar mitzvah at a holiday service -- but I don't know if it was. They schedule those pretty far in advance, so he would have had to have been particularly promising two years ago.

Today Dani and I went to the Shadyside home tour. We've never been to one of these before. Other neighborhoods have them too (though I've never heard of one in Squirrel Hill). The tour consisted of seven homes, all of which are clearly objects of obsession for their owners. I had assumed the tour would consist of big impressive mansions (there are several in Shadyside), but it was a mix of mostly "normal-person" homes, though with often-impressive restoration work. One small house was obviously a bachelor pad; the "bedroom" was in a loft visible from everyplace except directly below it, with no curtains or the like. Not the sort of place you live with a non-romantic roommate, or your kids. :-)

Tomorrow we are getting a new furnace. It's the sort of thing you shold do every half-century whether you need it or not. :-) Seriously, we think our current furnace is running at about 50% efficiency, and the new one will be abut 95%, so that should bring some relief on the winter gas bills.

( Hebrew minutiae )

There was a blank space where the spinach greens should be. I think they should have put Hostess Ho-Hos there with a sign saying "The healthier choice!" - Rob of Unspace, here.

On a related note, if Dani and I keel over in the next week, blame last night's spinach salad. Not that I think that would happen even if the spinach was infested, given that we're neither elderly nor children.

Quote of the day: "Don't worry if you don't know what eschatology is; it's not the end of the world." (From Dani.)

This map shows the dominant words used for soft drinks across the country. I don't know what's going on in Alaska, or in that swirl of yellow over Missouri.

Word of the day: insinuendo. (Applied to the phrase "sometimes it works the first time", referring to software development.)

Seen in a book on design patterns: "If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it might be a turkey wrapped in a duck adapter".

This one's been around for a few days, but in case there are folks who haven't seen it: a fun way to deal with folks who are stealing your wireless access (though tsk tsk for not locking it down if you care).

Dani: Which came first, Coke Zero or Pepsi One?

Monica: Pepsi One, as far as I know.

Dani: So Coke Zero is an attempt at one-downsmanship?

( more fluff )

Quote of the day (heard from Dani): Santa's helpers are subordinate clauses.

~~Applying animal-training techniques to one's spouse -- must investigate this. :-)~~ (From shalmestere.) Dang; failed to cache it before they took it down. Anyone recognize it and have a copy?

This year's Bulwer-Lytton contest (for the worst opening line of a novel).

New vocabulary (PDF), from a coworker. My favorite is: Karmageddon: It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer. I also like: Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

Seen in a .sig file: "6.5013 is the natural logarithm of the Beast."

Quote of the day (a few days ago) from dglenn: "'kthxbye' is the pinnacle of English's advancement, shortening 'All correct, Thank you, God be with you.' into seven lowercase letters. Humanity is doomed." -- kaeru in Urban Dictionary

Cat meets bird, and the victor isn't a foregone conclusion (forwarded by dyanearden). I recommend against drinking while reading. This reminds me of something that happened to our Irish Setter (big, dumb dog) once: I watched a butterfly tease him for a good ten minutes, dive-bombing him but not quite far enough and then flying back up a few feet.

Speaking of animals: Pavlov's cat, from alice_curiouser.

Quote of the day: "If you ask an engineer at KFC to describe their product, he'll tell you they make deep-fried dead chicken parts. If you ask a marketing person, he'll tell you it's finger-licking good." (Anonymous marketing person, to Dani.)

Today I learned that the company I work for gives employees small gifts on (certain) anniversaries. I learned this when my manager walked up to me with a framed certificate and a catalogue of stuff from which I can choose one item. That was a surprise. On the one hand, I've never made it to five years anywhere else (nature of the industry); on the other hand, I don't think I've ever worked in a place that would have given me loot for doing so.

I think Erik's fever broke; his nose doesn't feel hot today like it did last night. His appetite is picking up (though not quite at normal levels yet).

Once a year there is a local ulpan for teaching conversational Hebrew -- five 3-hour sessions in a bit over a week. This morning I hunted down the coordinator of the program (after finding an unsatisfying web site) and signed up. (It's in early June.) She asked me what level and I said that was a good question. After I described my background she suggested a level but said it would be easy to move to a different class if we discover on the first day that it's a bad fit. (I'm mildly surprised that this conversation occurred entirely in English; I figured she'd try to talk to me in Hebrew and see what happened.) Then five minutes later she called to invite me to the last few sessions of a currently-running (weekly) class. I can do that, and then maybe we'll have a better idea of placement for the ulpan.

Tonight/tomorrow is the last day of Pesach, which, like the first, is a holiday.

Last week the mail brought me a lovely gift from

ohiblather, and yesterday's mail brought a nice surprise from

chaiya. Thanks to both of you! You brightened my days.

This Saturday is the annual Shabbat service run by a local women's (Rosh Chodesh) group. I've chanted torah for them in the past, but concluded last year that that's too much work for those circumstances (not my congregation, very difficult scroll to read). So this year they asked me to lead part of the service. I'm still waiting for details on that; fortunately, I know the siddur they're using and I can lead pretty much anything from it at will. But you'd think that for something that only happens once a year, they would be organized a little farther in advance. (To be more specific, they have neither given me details nor given me autonomy to just do what I want. If they don't do the former they get the latter by default.)

A week or so ago at the grocery store I received a coupon good for a free car wash -- to be redeemed in February. Um, right. As it turned out, I got an accidental extension for another week or so; there was a nice day last week so I redeemed the coupon, but then the cashier said "the line's more than an hour long, you know". I said "um, no, I didn't -- can we undo this and I'll come back later?" No problem, she said -- the code is good for two weeks. If I'd known, I could have waited until today to try that. :-)

Yahoo is snooping on its users again. Thanks to blackpaladin for pointing this out. Look at their privacy statement, scan down to "web beacons", click the link, scan down to "outside the Yahoo network", decide if you're happy with that, and if not, click on "opt out". Then, do not be misled by the button on the results page; it's not a "submit" or the like but rather "undo this".

I enjoyed these food quotes from magid.

This is what happens sometimes when creative people are confronted with stupid demands while in silly moods. Thanks, mortuus.

You know you're among geeks when questions like "but really, what is the true nature of a book?" make perfect sense. (A group of mostly tech writers and moi, discussing the partitioning of a doc set into DocBook-sanctioned units like sets, books, parts, and chapters.)

Quote of the day: ...And adjectives, like gang members, seldom ventured out alone. They went out in twos and threes, and God help us, fours, and piled up on any person, place or thing that got in their way. "Look! It's a noun -- let's get it!" -- Robert Masello, quoted by mabfan here. This is one in a series of excellent posts on rules of writing fiction.

Rabbi Micha Berger posted an article about types of halachic rulings that I found useful.

Sunday night we went to see the Narnia movie (finally). The previews were mostly aimed at kids, with one notable exception (The White Countess); that was an odd combination. One of the previews was for Hoot, which appears to be another in the theme of "these kids, and only these kids, can save the world (or their small part of it)". I find that while I'm willing to suspend that sort of disbelief in a fantasy or SF millieu -- Narnia, my recent D&D game, and a number of novels boil down to this plot -- I am usually unable to do so for stories set in the real world. So Hoot came across to me as dumb and lame, even though I was sitting there waiting for Narnia.

A doctor friend was recently opining that "some guy" is responsible for about 80% of ER visits from violent crimes, and if we can just find him we'll all be better off. "For instance", he said, "you get reports like 'there I was, sitting on my front porch at 3AM reading my bible and minding my own business, when Some Guy shot me!'". Err, this might be more challenging than he thinks.

I caused a telemarketer to violate the script this weekend. I was lured in by him pronouncing my name correctly, so I didn't immediately detect his true nature. Then he said "I'm calling from the PA Pro-Life Commission" (or some such) and I interrupted and said "you really have a wrong number". He stopped mid-shpiel and apologized. Negative points for calling in the first place but positive points for not persisting. And maybe this one will actually put me on their do-not-call list.

A random thought: in this age of global communication, when giving an email correspondent your phone number it is polite to mention your time zone. On the internet nobody knows you're a dog, and also, nobody knows you're in Bangladesh. Or wherever. Fortunately, Google can answer these sorts of questions pretty easily given the phone number, unless it's a cell phone.

Saturday is a local SCA event, Dance and Romance. It's a free event (pot-luck food) at Pitt, and as the name implies, there will be a lot of dancing. Ensemble Rigodon (that's On the Mark's SCA identity) will be doing a short concert, and lots of us will undoubtedly be playing dance music all day. Should be fun!

Quote of the day: "[Pushing data from Perl to Excel is] sort of like when you've been trying to get two acquaintances to meet and talk to each other, but there's all these mishaps that occur, and finally, they talk, and get along pretty well, until one day one realizes that the other one talks too fucking much and segfaults in their face." (

dr4b, here)

ISN: Clark defends domestic psi-surveilance program (by osewalrus).

I keep getting spam claiming to be my "last chance" for the offer du jour. I don't think that phrase means what they think it means. The amount of spam reaching my mailbox has gone down, but the amount that's trying to get there is up again after a dip for a few weeks. I have four layers of protection; since the beginning of Shabbat (two days) the statistics are:

Bounced by pobox.com on my behalf: about 475
Held by pobox.com as suspicious (all actual spam): about 60
Caught by SpamAssassin as almost certainsly spam (score 7+): about 120
Caught by SpamAssassin as probably spam but worth looking 'cause sometimes it catches legitimate mail (score 5+): about 40
Made it to my inbox: about 50

Currently I skim the pobox bounce reports every few days because I toughened the rules a week or so ago, but obviously that's not viable long-term. (I check the "held" pile every couple days; that catches legitimate mail occasionally, but then I can whitelist those senders.) Some of the obvious spam that gets all the way through has low SpamAssassin scores (2 or 3); I'm not sure how they're pulling that off, but dropping the threshold that low would catch way too much legitimate mail. I don't know if better tuning of all the parameters is possible, but so far pobox is doing the bulk of the work and only rarely catching legitimate mail (in the "held" pile, where I can get it back).

Erik has been more clingy than usual lately. I'm vaguely thinking "for about the last month"; I wonder if it's been since Pennsic. I didn't notice it immediately, if so. I wonder what it means. (He is especially clingy when I am working at the computer, alas.)

Last night Dani and I went to the Coldstone Creamery for the first time. (Yeah, we're slow -- but let it never be said that we are slaves to fashion. No, I don't think you were going to say that anyway.) The ice cream was good but maybe not as good as the price would suggest. We couldn't help thinking that while it would defeat their gimmick, a blender would speed up processing of the customer queue.

Seen at work: "Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life."

Today was our company's annual retreat, where we close the office and go do company-focus-building stuff in a secluded cabin or the like. It's a good idea, but I don't think we actually needed to go as far out of the city as we did this time. (This was a new location for us.) It took almost an hour to get there. I'm really glad I hitched a ride, because some of the signage was quite poor and I probably wouldn't have found the place on my own.

We actually have budget for conferences; I wonder what it would be most beneficial for me to attend. (I didn't get my act together for SIGDOC this year, which is happening as I write this.)

Pennsic went well this year. This entry is going to be long. It is also incomplete; there'll be more in future entries.

( Read more... )

Happy birthday

tangerinpenguin!

How not to manage a software project #173: (overheard and taken out of context) "...and if we assume that the tooth fairy knows Java...".)

I have this pasta salad that I wanted to use up, but in dinner-sized portions rather than side-dish-sized portions. The salad has assorted vegetables in it and an oil-based dressing, but no mayo. This worked: mix with grated cheese and sour cream, put in casserole, sprinkle top with more cheese, and bake. I guess it's sort of like lasagna and sort of like a kugel, but with (in this case) tri-color springs instead of conventional noodles. But hey, it worked!

From a local newspaper: An interview with the rat lady (a local SCA person who is well-known at Pennsic as a purveyor of plague rats). She's a neat person. It's a pity the article didn't quote her shpiel -- it changes over time, but tends to include things like "they work on your friends, they work on your enemies, they even work on the Board of Directors -- I'll bet you didn't know anything worked on the Board of Directors...".

Using discomfort as a social yardstick, from dmnsqrl.

Seen in a .sig file: "What did cured ham actually have?"

Ambiguous spam of the day: "Indulge your Java passion". Oh, they meant coffee.

Understaffed, but no budget for hiring? Try Primate Programming Inc. "Humans and higher primates share approximately 97% of their DNA in common. Recent research in primate programming suggests computing is a task that most higher primates can easily perform. Visual Basic 6.0 was the preferred IDE for the majority of experiment primate subjects."

I happened to notice the feeding instructions on a package of cat food recently. They started "For average adult cats (6-8 pounds)...". Since when is 6-8 pounds average? (Granted, they didn't say "healthy".) I know a lot more 10-pound adult cats than 4-pound ones. In fact, I don't think I've ever met an adult cat under 5 pounds. What do these guys think the standard deviation is?

Speaking of cat food, I found this prominently displayed on a package of cat treats: "tuna is the #1 ingredient!" Well sure, but ingredients order doesn't really tell you anything about absolute volume, only relative volume. To make tuna beat grain, all you have to do is separately list flour, corn meal, barley, etc etc. Makers of kids' breakfast cereal do this sort of thing to prevent sugar from being the first ingredient. (Sugar, corn syrup, succrose, marshmallows (consisting of...), etc.) So why stop with tuna? Throw in enough assorted junk and you can advertise caviar or filet mignon as your #1 ingredient!

I got a call from a surveyor a couple days ago. I enjoy trying to figure out who's sponsoring the survey based on the questions. This one asked about the types of charitable organizations I support, then zeroed in on animal-related charities (scripted, not prompted by what I said), then asked specific questions about two organizations (after claiming that those two had been randomly selected from a list). So I think either the ASPCA or HSUS was trying to see how they're doing and whether the public thinks they're interchangable. The decoy was that early on they asked for strength of reaction (positive or negative) to a bunch of organizations, ranging from these to PETA and WWF. They were completely uninterested in reasons for strong reactions, though, and their questions didn't capture them for me. (HSUS no longer gets my money because they persist in sending me trinkets, WWF doesn't get anything from me because they're spammers, and PETA is IMO wacko. ASPCA is ok.) Well, whoever they were, good luck interpreting the best data I could supply for the questions they actually asked...

The giving of Torah happened at one specific time, but the receiving of Torah happens all the time, in every generation. (Meir Alter, the Gerer Rebbe.)

A cute bit from last night's episode of "Andromeda" (highly approximate):

Our heroes are in a remote place with a pile of assorted electronics.
Dylan: Can you do anything with this?
Rommie: Can you be more specific?
Dylan: I want to blow this place up.
Rommie: You want a bomb.
Dylan: Yes.
Tyr: Do we get to go home first?
Rommie: You want a timer.
Dylan: Yes.

The episode built on the hokey season opener, but at least they did it entertainingly this time.

We've been watching "Mister Sterling", and I'm quite enjoying it. (It's on Friday nights, so we usually don't see it before Sunday.) I think Dani is still at the "has potential" stage, but I'm more thoroughly hooked. Good writing, interesting characters, and a lot of the fast-paced feel of "West Wing" (though not quite so well-developed, the show being only four episodes along so far). Recommended.

We've also been watching "Sports Night", and will probably just order the DVD soon. It's by Aaron Sorkin ("West Wing"), and while it's not as good as that show, it's still pretty well-done. I suspect that a significant part of the difference is the length of the show; it's got to be hard to really build and resolve a story in 22 minutes.

Sunday dinner this week was based on a ramen-noodles theme, because the host just got laid off. We decided to come bearing an appropriate gift: mac 'n' cheese. Because it was a gift, we bought the "deluxe" variety. It got the laugh we were hoping for.

I don't think I've ever eaten cookies with noodles in them before, but they really worked! Because ramen noodles are basically flavorless, they impart texture without affecting the taste. Of course, things would turn out rather differently were you to use the seasoning packets in the cookies.

Monica

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weekend bits

quote of the day

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conversation snippets

links (mostly)

on the lighter side

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quote, link, spam

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Pennsic (part 1)

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"today's wisdom" (from Beliefnet)

Sunday's short takes

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