Monica

bitsy_legend

A few weeks ago BitDefender, my antivirus software, stopped working -- attempting to run a scan emitted a very unhelpful error message. Some time with Google showed me that lots of people were having that problem, and after some work I found and installed a patch. Today it shut down again, and after I tried all the new remedies suggested on a BD forum (lots more people are having this problem) I, in a moment of "it can't hurt" desperation, reinstalled the patch. (It should already be there, right?) And it started working again. I wonder what is going on. Customer support has been responsive but of mediocre quality so far. Ah well, one more reason to move to the new machine sooner rather than later. Once I have the Mac, I won't need the PC to be on the internet. And if I were staying with Windows, I'd surely replace BitDefender with something else when the annual subscription expires. (I have not, by the way, seen any evidence that the machine has actually been infected with anything.)

Signal boost: 530nm330hz has been developing his own siddur for personal use, and wants to know if enough people to justify a small production run are interested. The sample pages are quite lovely (a nice siddur can be more than just the words on the page); he's using color to effectively indicate variations for weekday, Shabbat, and festivals, and is laying it out in a way that sounds useful. Andrew's Orthodox, so it'll be a complete siddur.

This afternoon we saw a flurry of bicyclists cruising down our street. (There appears to have been some sort of organized activity, but I'm not sure what.) And, among them, I saw one guy on a huge unicycle. The wheeel was at least three feet across, possibly four. I wondered how one mounts a unicycle with a wheel diameter bigger than one's inseam. I don't yet have the internet in my pocket, so I had to wait until we got home to find out. Err, now that I know I'm even more impressed. I'm still not sure what you do about temporary stops, like red lights, though. It sounds like you need a hand-hold to get going; what do you do if none are available?

Quote of the day #2: "Always double-check your math if there are explosives involved", via kyleri.

Why aren't people commenting on my post? I've had this in a browser tab for a while waiting for a "misc" post to add it to, and I no longer remember where I got it.

I didn't know about the Netflix prize until siderea posted about it. Nifty! Improve their predictions by 10%; win a million bucks. It'll be interesting if the psychologist ends up beating the mathematicians.

I recently attended a religious service that had a lot of poetry in it. Or, at least, I assume it was poetry, but it made me wonder: surely modern (meterless, structureless) poetry is more than just doing things with white space, right? I mean, I understand a sonnet or a sestina at some level; I see the challenges that faced the author and can appreciate the artistry worked within those constraints. I have, thus far, been unable to develop such an appreciation for the choice of where to put a line break, except in the small subset of cases where that creates a change in meaning or creates an accrostic or some such. It feels, to me, sort of like composing music without concerning oneself with key, mode, or time signature. Obviously I'm missing something.

I was asked a few days ago to read a short torah portion this Shabbat. I wondered how long it would take me to learn (it's about 12 lines in the scroll). Answer, for first-order learning: 35 minutes. That was surprising. Of course, it will require daily reinforcement to keep it, but that's fine.

Note to self: I was talking with someone recently about what I look for in candiates for the laurel (the SCA's highest award for arts and sciences), and remembered that I had written about this a while back. Yup, still believe all that, almost six years later.

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.)

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 )

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).

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.

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.

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.

dr4b

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).

( Read more... )

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...