Monica

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.

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.

I keep a log for Erik, recording anything unusual and all medication starts/stops. I started doing this because I thought there might be correlations between meds and appetite changes; none have emerged so far, but it's turned out to be useful in other ways. ("Any vomiting?" "June 2, in the morning". "You know that stuff?") So anyway... Erik's appetite had been low last week, so at my vet's direction I gave him fluids for a few days (also logged). Things got better so I stopped, but Monday he was back to not eating so I hit him again, this time with a bit more because I could (150ml). Tuesday's log entry: "oink". :-) Good to see that work sometimes... (The healthy appetite has continued today.)

I have a minor workplace mystery. Yesterday someone left me a post-it note containing a charge code and nothing else, and used my Sharpie to do so without recapping it (so it was dried out and useless). I asked the usual suspects, but no one recognized the code. Shrug. Today I came in to find my entire post-it pad and several pens missing. WTF? I have the back desk in a two-person enclosed space; it's unlikely that a passerby needed a pen or some paper and my desk was the most convenient source. I wonder what surprise will greet me tomorrow.

Language peeves: "council" is a body; "counsel" is what advisors give. "Populous" means there are lots of people; "populace" is the people. The "populous" should not be giving "council" to anyone, ok? (Both of these errors are common on SCA mailing lists.)

Language Log reproduces some careless spam from Barnes and Noble. I like the poster's method of thanking them.

Funny cat video via thnidu.

Something in our house is chirping intermittently. It sounds like a smoke detector, but we've changed all the relevant batteries and it hasn't stopped. It does not happen predictably (and when it does it chirps only once), so it's very hard to localize. Whee.

otterblossom

Scott Adams speaks sense about flag-burning.

Lesson learned: interns go where you point them. :-) They'll do exactly what you tell them to do, and they haven't been out in the world long enough to encounter nuance, so don't give vague directions. (In this case: swap in this new logger class, and while you're at it get rid of the direct calls to System.out.println(). Um, yeah -- I should have said explicitly to replace them with calls to the logger where it made sense to do so. I didn't mean wipe them out entirely. Fortunately, that's why we have change control.)

I recently picked up (at deep discount) the first season of a TV show called Jeremiah, pretty much entirely because J. Michael Straczynski wrote it. (Well, he wrote the episodes; the story is based on a comic book by someone else.) The show ran two seasons on Showtime c. 2002-2003. Only the first is available on DVD, so there is disappointment down the road for me, but so far I'm really enjoying what I've seen (six episodes). The premise is that 15 years ago some mega-virus wiped out everyone on earth past puberty; the kids who survived are now adults living in the aftermath. Jeremiah and his sidekick Kurdy are two of the guys in (figurative) white hats; my one-word characterization of Jeremiadh is "paladin". Jeremiah is trying to find a place his parents named before they died, though he's not sure why it's important, and the few people who've heard of it won't talk about it. We've seen glimpses of his back-story (particularly that he feels responsible for his brother's death) and I assume more will be forthcoming. So far the show seems to be episodic with a loose arc, but it's early yet. ( speculation -- not technically spoilers, I don't think, but cut anyway )

I might see psu_jedi and caryabend tomorrow morning. Woot! They will, alas, be spending most of the weekend with the relatives they actually came here to visit, but with luck we should get to see each other briefly. It was so nice to finally meet them at estherchaya's and sethcohen's over Purim!

Sunday night is Shavuot. I'm looking forward to the late-night torah study. The evening service, which is confirmation, I can take or leave; I'll go if it and dinner plans don't bump into each other. And I will, of course, be there for services in the morning.

My week was full of demands on my time that aren't part of the project plan. The project manager will not be happy when we next meet. Some of it was important stuff that needs to be done; some of it was extra administrivia caused by the corporate buy-out. I've now spent about 6 hours on the VPN problem and it still doesn't work, for instance. Whee.

But I did accomplish one useful thing today: we've been asking for a little developer time for months to hook online help into our product, but the project and product managers keep saying that while this is important, other things are more important and they can't spare anybody, even for half a day. So I finally just did it -- forgiveness versus permission and all that. As soon as I have a real doc set to launch instead of Shakespeare's sonnets, I can check it in. The project manager was going to be a little grumpy anyway because of things beyond my control this week, so I may as well get something I wanted out of the deal. Waste not, want not.

This exercise did make me just a bit more aware that I would benefit from a structured learning experience on the subject of Java. I've been picking the API up by osmosis, and of course I already know general programming principles, but when I have to do something completely new I usually end up asking a coworker for a pointer. That's not good; I should be able to do more of this on my own. (Today it was resource access through ClassLoader.) I wonder if I should just take a course from Sun or something. If I do, I wonder if there's any benefit to then taking the certification exam.

At work, today was largely a day of putting out fires. They weren't usually my fires, but often I seemed to be the only person who knows where we keep the fire hose. This must change. :-) (This will change, as some of the people involved are new hires who are responsible for learning this stuff. But knowledge transfer has not been orderly.)

Yesterday a repairman was supposed to come between 8:30 and noon. Dani and I agree that a phone call at 2:10 saying he'll be over soon, with no prior contact (and no ability to track him down), does not meet expectations. Now, to see if Sears agrees with our assessment that we're due expedited service if we reschedule through them... And to prevent Dani from salvaging anything useful from a morning spent at home, the meter reader who was supposed to come between 8 and noon didn't show either. Whee. (At least Dani is set up to work from home fairly easily. I'm not.)