ACM sent me this totally awesome von Neumann mug for being a member for 3 years. I'm totally going to rock this at the office.
Wait, it's only been 3?
"Webmaster" and "sysop." I work in technology, but they just don't come up very often. I don't even see them in the (decently often) interaction I have with my web hosting provider.
"Tier 2," on the other hand, is daily vocab.
I just sold the 3. I would have kept it far longer if I didn't have so many long-term automotive relationship issues. Even though it left to make room for my 914, I'm nevetheless sad to see it go.
Speaking of the 914, those of you who can remember past last week (I can't) may recall that I bought it well over three months ago. For the first two months or so, I was way too busy to actually post the 3 for sale—but since July 21 it's been posted on Craigslist and I've been suffering through endless choppy emails and dweebs who come take a look at it and then try to lowball me.
I think that's why I find racism to be so curious. There are so many reasons to dislike someone, and you're going to go with color?
—Shalom Auslander
Courtesy This American Life.
This is what happens when you throw $184,000 of upgrades onto a ... Toyota Prius?
I can't imagine any other car which is so hip by being so low-bling.
Three specs I implement are entering standardization.
Interesting topics today include Defend Your Castle (pictured), a riotous romp of quick gameplay and hilarious art, and Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People (and you can play too!) which is essentially exactly as you expect.
Both of these are available for the Wii, and are loads of fun. Props to everyone who tipped me on to these (Aaron, Tiff, and .. Kyle for SBCGfAP?)
Apparently Duke Nukem 3D is being released for Xbox Live. This is one of the best retro games to be released for the platform since Tapper.
<insert snarky comment about Duke Nukem Forever here>
If you live in Washington, don't forget to vote tomorrow.
Practically everyone I know out here lives in King county, so if you don't know already where your polling place is, you can find it here. They're all open from 7am to 8pm.
I've been thinking about getting a Garmin Forerunner 405 for about six months now, and yesterday I picked one up. It's a training watch with a built in GPS tracker.
Here's the low-down from a day's worth of use.
- It's beefy. This is a big watch. Anyone significantly smaller than I may find it uncomfortably large. But, I went on a ~15 minute run earlier today and didn't notice the bulk at all once I got underway.
- It takes a while to get started. After entering "Training" mode with the GPS enabled, the watch acquires satellites for 15+ seconds before you can get going. For me, that means standing in my front lawn staring at my watch.
- It's awesome. The watch provides stats on my pace and whether I'm meeting my goals, and can apparently be programmed with courses and stuff. The data is all accessible later (downloaded automatically when I walk near my computer!) and ends up being rendered in totally kickass shots like the one at right, with way more telemetry than I'll ever need.
I still haven't gotten all of the settings figured out, but the only somewhat bothersome part I've found so far is that it's difficult to get heart rate information overlaid on any of the screens that presents pace information. So if I want to know both (which I do), I need to switch back and forth during the run an awful lot.
I spotted this in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco while I was in the area last weekend.
What the hell is it? It's a weird huge orange bus. The first two things that popped into my mind were "firefighters" or maybe "Chinese government group."
The vending machine doesn't have any popcorn. So when someone took a handy blue marker and scrawled across the machine's plastic window front in small block letters, we want popcorn, it didn't surprise me too much. Someone liked popcorn, and wanted the vending machine stocker to know that.
But after a few weeks of steady replenishments of every other staple in the machine—chips, candy bars, "healthy" bars that are probably just as bad as candy bars, and even gum—the request for popcorn went unheeded. Now I'm not even sure how you would get popcorn into a vending machine in the first place but whether it was possible seemed unimportant. Someone was clearly dying for popcorn.
I'm not sure if it was the lack of popcorn or the plea scribbled across the clear plastic, but that's when the machine started eating change. Countless souls have lost presidentially adorned precious metals into the slotted maw of the machine—I witnessed more than a few, all of whom seemed either angry or explanatory. Either way, I always knew the occasions when someone lost some cash into the machine, because they told anyone else in the kitchenette that it just happened.
That's when the first warning arrived.
No change!
was left scrawled across an envelope and taped onto the coin collector. The thing about the envelope is that it was one of many small paper envelopes left in a plastic tray affixed to the machine—these were envelopes you could use to notify the vending machine repair man that you lost change in the throat of the black plastic beast. Clearly someone thought that this particular envelope would be better used as a warning than as a means of redemption.
Machine doesn't return change
was soon added on another envelope, taped across the coin return button.
Also, this machine does not accept quarters
on the third enveloped seemed a little unnnecessary at this point. Clearly the machine had issues and even if you had the courage to face it and had the fortitude of correct change, it certainly seems that you could find out on your own that the machine didn't accept quarters thank you very much.
And that's when the last shred of sanity fell through the coin acceptor.
Also, this machine eats babies!
was tucked right behind the most recent envelope, and was soon followed by the patriotic sentiment in,
Wrong on change! Wrong for America!
shortly followed by,
Right for Freedomland!
At this point the original popcorn activist seemed to get a little riled, as they added a big cartoon thought bubble sticker to the front of the machine and printed in big block letters,
We NEED popcorn!
which did little to quiet the peanut gallery (of which many were available in the machine).
Don't believe the lies! Popcorn is sin!
At which point, nearly everyone could feel the momentum and rising stakes between all who had left their mark scribbled across the front of the hulking snacktime dispensary. The growing crescendo of pleas, taunts, and protests formed a wave of small envelopes and blue marker, ready to crash down onto all who used the kitchenette, pulling anyone with a mid-afternoon hunger into the absurd undertow of printed characters and armchair idealism. The machine that had only beckoned for quarters and a two-digit selection (don't accidentally hit the number for gum!) now screamed for someone—anyone—to pull the cap off the little blue pen and dip their hand into the tray of unused envelopes, only to find
that the tray was empty. And as the would-be activist hesitantly detached their eyes from the suburban graffiti littering the front of the machine, they would find a lone yellow sticky note on the front of the plastic envelope tray that read simply,
Need more envelopes.
P.S. This happened today.
The Washington state primary is coming up on August 19. This excites me far more than the Presidential primaries and caucuses that swept through months ago.
One interesting point is that this year, Washington has switched to a Top 2 primary, in which the two candidates with the most votes will advance to the general election for a single open position, regardless of their stated party affiliation. It also means that the individual parties don't hold their own public primaries, which means that the candidates for each office haven't necessarily been fully vetted against their peers. This means there are offices for which dozens of Democrats and Republicans are squaring off against each other—and against a bunch of independents1.
So, that will be interesting.
There's only one ballot initiative this time around: Initiative 26, to make a handful of currently partisan offices (county executive, county assessor, and county councilors) non-partisan. Even though this will hide each candidate's party affiliation at election time, I think it's a good idea—local politics are too nuanced and close-quarters for voters to be blindly following party lines. I admit that affiliation often sneaks into non-partisan offices, but I think that making these non-partisan is a step in the right direction in making office holders more accountable to their constituency than to their party.
In related news, I got a mailer the other day from furniture magnate Tom Udall who, despite my Washington mailing address, still mails me about talks on the NMT campus. It's not completely out of the realm of the reasonable that I would be interested, but it nevertheless makes me chuckle.
1 only some are nutjobs.
Colma, California is located just south of San Francisco, and is reportedly the world's only modern necropolis. The dead outnumber the living there by around 1,000:1.
While in San Fran I happened to catch a public radio special on the history of Colma and the interesting set of challenges it faces. It was originally founded because SF is stuck on 49 square miles and the founders didn't want to waste any (more) space in the city on cemeteries. Existing cemeteries were moved from SF to Colma right after the latter was founded in the early 1900s, and many burials that would have happened in SF moved outside—often to Colma.
Apparently there were a few screwups along the way and one cemetery was moved without an accompanying endowment. The site is now an abandoned lot right next to a Home Depot. Their mayor also recently resigned after numerous allegations of misconduct.
The city also has, reportedly, the highest per-capita income of any city in the state of California. Residents get free daytime child care and the city purchases allotments of tickets to Giants games for citizens that request them.
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