| Since I'm contracting, I have to fill out time sheets (apparently all employees do here, which is a giant pain as far as I'm concerned). The online time sheet application lets you plug in the numbers and helpfully does the weekly total at the end.
In decimal. In quarter hour increments.
So eight hours and fifteen minutes is typed in as "8.25".
And here is where I think "Don't we have computers to help us with this?" Because seriously, people, this is exactly the sort of thing computers excel at: Take the figure that's in everyone's mind (8:15) and turn it into a figure that a computer is better at dealing with (8.25). I don't care what the back-end requirements are, make it work right one the front end. And speaking of excel, that's exactly what the spreadsheet I cooked up in five minutes does. Five minutes (or 0.083333333333333333333333333333333333 of an hour).
The excuse, so rumor has it, is that this is a military-derived system. While I can believe that this sort of asshattery has an armed services origin, that's simply no excuse for perpetuating it.
Remarkably (or perhaps not so), the FAQ for the application doesn't mention perhaps the MOST FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION EVER ABOUT THIS APPLICATION. I consider that to be emblematic of the lack of a good reason to keep it that way. The combined psychic weight of hundreds of people reading that and thinking "that's preposterous" is probably enough to stun an elephant. | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment   |
| Here's a handy tip for the makers of cell phones. There are five things I really care about when using a cell phone, and they're presented in order.
- Sound Quality
- Range
- Battery Life
- Contact Management
- Cost
What I'd really like to have, but it seems like almost nobody gets it.
- Out of Order voicemail browsing from the handset.
- Download Voicemail.
- Download Text/Media Messages.
- Standardized Contact Synchronization.
- Full profile/data backup and restore.
What's nice, but shouldn't displace anything of the above.
- Camera
- Calendar
- Web Browsing
- Applications
- Real GPS
| | comments: 18 comments or Leave a comment |
| I like booze.
I mean, really. Anyone who's seen my liquor cabinet can pretty much figure that out. If you like some sort of alcoholic beverage, I probably have it. I've probably got something you didn't know existed. I'm a collector of sorts.
I also like women. Not in a collector way, as people aren't something that can be owned or possessed. More of a "you endlessly fascinate me please hang out with me" kind of way. Or something like that. The less I try to explain it the better, probably.
My brain is sort of blunted to the cheap misogyny of endless light beer ads that are endured during football season. I would gladly visit a beatdown on the "author" of various GoDaddy commercials, but it would only be the half-hearted due diligence of one too used to the noise.
Bacardi is running an ad campaign aimed at women, promoting the "ugly girlfriend" as the latest accessory for the trendy woman on the go with a Bacardi Breezer. Four obviously Photoshopped women grace the interior complete with disturbingly unflattering descriptions. This sort of thing is a whole new level of awful that I wouldn't really think of as effective and engaging advertising, to say the least. It makes me lose my taste for Bacardi pretty effectively.
Anyway, if you have a question about which brands Bacardi owns so you know who to boycott, the Bacardi website is more than happy to help you.
PS: (a bizarre aside is that most of the sites talking about this (well, all the sites that I've seen) only contain pictures of the larger women in the campaign. The two small women aren't mentioned at all. Granted, overall including the front cover, three of the five models are larger than average, while the remaining two appear to be smaller than average. But if you just count the models with descriptions, it's half and half. Is derision against the small more acceptable among the set of folks angry about this, or is it just people repeating the first person who only took two biased screen captures?) | | comments: 26 comments or Leave a comment |
| I pride myself on being able to eat the nastiest vegetable (and dairy) matter we humans can cook (or ferment, or what have you) up. I've eaten natto, kimchi, many of the smelliest chesses, and a wide variety of (perfectly legal) fungus.
It's possible that I'm not a super-taster. So be it.
I've been wanting to try Huitlacoche for quite some time for exactly this reason, but I'd yet to work up the gumption to venture into a tienda to get a can. Sunday, however, we went to Jibarra with the Dads (a week early, but it made sense) and found that their vegetarian tacos came with huitlacoche. No description of it was given. Amusing.
So I asked for extra.
When it came, the filling was dark with the stuff. But I was blown away by the relative non-nastiness of it. I mean, sure, it tasted like mushrooms: woody, earthy, protein-y; but essentially it was fungus. Tasty! Now I will redouble my efforts to find some.
(a dissenting view) | | comments: 7 comments or Leave a comment |
| Nope, I still have a job.
No, what I'm talking about is the Raleigh Government's new twitter feeds.
A while back, I made an rss feed for their news website, after never receiving a reply to multiple requests for such a thing.
The twitter thing is alright, I guess; but I think I'm still going to keep generating the feed. Yes, you can get an RSS of the twitter feed, but it looks ugly in comparison to mine (If I do say so myself), given the line limit on twitter; and who wants to get City Government news on their phone?
It looks like they're throwing a few other things into the mix, too, though I can't find out where the data is coming from. It seems to be just a "whatever might be important that we find the time to type in" kind of thing, but this one in particular is singularly unhelpful. | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Technically, Peter Frampton used a talk box, but since they say "Peter Frampton style" [emphasis mine] I should probably let it go. Then again, I suppose I could get all heated about using AA vernacular in the title, too. Is it ok if you do it sarcastically? | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| | I'm more than a little peeved at the Bush-league substitution of the phrase "preventive detention" for "imprisoned indefinitely without trial". I'm pretty certain I didn't vote for "do the same damn thing, just change the words". I'm not above realizing that all politicians are disappointing in some manner; I was just hoping to be disappointed in a new exciting way. | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
| I was at IBM, but I was in sort of a cubicle/lab area instead of my office. I'd just tried to sort out some travel and meetings (some of which involved being outdoors hiking or something), and I'd come back to find my work computer gone. It seems an intern had assumed I wasn't coming back and put my stuff up on the internal website to be acquired by someone else. This intern, who was deaf (which I mention because she kept turning her back to me and it was incredibly frustrating) [aside: It's refreshing to see my brain is on board with affirmative action] wasn't working hard enough to make this right (which was also frustrating).
Waking up I realized I should have been able to trace the asset tag and get it all back.
Also, I realized I was being a dick.
Which is sort of depressing and disturbing all at once. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| I'm a longtime, well-known fan of Perl, but nothing can be perfect 100% of the time. Check out this particular function, int(). You'd usually use it to take the integer part of a floating point number. Handy, but there be dragons...
You should not use this function for rounding: one because it truncates towards 0 , and two because machine representations of floating point numbers can sometimes produce counterintuitive results. For example, int(-6.725/0.025) produces -268 rather than the correct -269; that's because it's really more like -268.99999999999994315658 instead.
And then goes on to suggest alternatives.
Here's an idea. You know what the function is supposed to do. You know how to make it happen an alternative way. Make the function do what it's supposed to do. I will personally guarantee you that nobody is counting on that counterintuitive result. You have have it in writing and everything.
Sheesh. | | comments: 7 comments or Leave a comment |
| I've bitched before about internet noobs who misread their own e-mail addresses. It used to be that most of the time, that sort of thing was impossible. When you sent e-mail, your address (and the return address) was immutable (unless you were a sysadmin). Now with all these new fancy mail clients it's apparently possible to send out stuff with the wrong return address.
Most of the time, someone with my first initial and last name will forget (or never suspect?) that Time Warner has added some uniquifying or canonicalizing characters after their last name, and just use my e-mail address as if it's theirs. They don't get my e-mail, of course. I get theirs. It takes an appalingly long time for folks to get the message, maybe due to helpful mail clients that remember the wrong one for them.
What's worse, though, is when they use my e-mail address when signing up for some Internet service. Many times, the business will have no procedure for looking up an e-mail address. It baffles them that someone could enter a wrong e-mail address and yet have it still go to someone. I sometimes have to resort to sending a real piece of paper (or worse, a fax), asking to be removed from the mailing list.
Sometimes it's as easy as an unsubscribe. Rare, joyful occasions allow me access to someone else's account, but (mindful of being called a cyberterrorist) I usually simply reset the e-mail to the CEO of the company in question (I presume that sort of thing gets quick service).
I have had the urge to cancel a flight or two, but I'm really not that mean.
What really kills me, though, is this page. It seems innocuous enough (excepting the fact that the email addresses aren't listed on the "contact" page. Go look, I'll wait), until you try and click on those e-mail addresses at the bottom. Not only is the address in the "mailto:" url different from what's displayed; the ones displayed DON'T EVEN WORK. This is the sort of thing that makes me want to punch everyone involved. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| From a letter sent to NPR.
I listened with great interest and then growing disgust to NPR reporter Melissa Block interviewing freelance reporter Roxana Saberi. What struck me is not the harrowing tale of psychological torture and forced confessions that she endured in Iran, but the literal interrogation she suffered at the hands of an apparently incredulous Melissa Block.
Would that NPR interviewed actual criminals in such a brutal manner. I can name several people off the top of my head (many from the last administration, of course) much more deserving of such a grilling. It's clear Block didn't have a grasp of what this woman had been through during her internment; and I'm actually pretty surprised that Saberi granted an interview at all.
This woman was imprisoned by an oppressive theocratic regime and had a false confession extracted under intense interrogation complete with threats of execution. Given the similarity of her story to stories told by many Iranian political prisoners (from Human Rights watch) we have no cause to disbelieve her on this point. Given that, why give any truth to the misinformation spread about her? Why hold things she may or may not have said under psychological torture against her? Are we no better than they?
I know it must be hard for NPR to believe that even her defense lawyer would lie about her (shock, horror), but I keep coming back to the fact that she was falsely imprisoned in Iran: Sharia law, kangaroo courts, and arbitrary and capricious government and law enforcement.
It's shameful that, upon her release, Saberi's nightmare continued while so many other public figures interviewed on NPR get the soft treatment.
| | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| I'm not a smoker, but the current craze to legislate every public space (even some outdoor ones) as non-smoking chafes me quite a bit. On the one hand, the poor dears are addicted, so they're not going to start staying home in droves while their non-addicted friends are out having a good time. On the other hand, this is billed as a health issue, but legislated as a morality issue; which bugs the hell out of me.
If this was truly legislated as a health issue, the legislation would look markedly different. For all kinds of contaminants/pollutants, there are allowable minimums. Even health codes in restaurants do this. We don't say "no insect parts in peanut butter, ever" we say "Average of 30 insect fragments per 100 grams is probably ok". Workplaces have to meet OSHA regulations for various aspects of safety (noise, chemicals, etc.)
So, smoke is an airborne pollutant. Treat it like one. Require adequate smoke handling equipment that gets checked regularly. If you want to have a smoking establishment, you have to get the equipment and keep it up to date. Set a maximum smoke level, requirements for air exchange, everything. Sure, it's going to be pricey, but if you really think that this is important to your establishment, you're going to fund it. If the market really wants something like that, it will work out.
Fortunately, we live in an area with a lot of temperate weather. And smoking outdoors isn't illegal, yet.
PS: Alibi sans smoke was really rad. | | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment |
| Excerpted is the text of a letter sent to the Discovery Channel just now. (links added for livejournal)
I'd sent e-mail to you before, bemoaning the lack of scientific accuracy on one of your episodes, so I think it's only fair to send you accolades now.
I forget the particular episode number, but it involved an extremely dangerous magnesium fire in a warehouse. Rather than simply say "Water can't put out Magnesium fires", Pitts gave a more detailed description of how the chemical reaction of steam and magnesium splits the hydrogen off, increasing the available combustible fuel, instead of putting out the fire.
That was pretty awesome. Thanks.
Which, in fact, it was. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| "In this post 9/11 world." has now been replaced with "In this current economic crisis."
In this current economic crisis, jerks of all stripes are floating to the surface. I got a letter today from a company calling themselves "U.S. Claims Services". Such a grand sweeping name immediately put me on my guard. Turns out they've mined the files of North Carolina Unclaimed Property, and are mailing possible matches to offer assistance.
Now, I already know about my unclaimed property, and the form I filed in March, and that as of a week ago they were working on claims from last November. However, this letter raised several questions, one of them rather important.
- Are they really charging %15 to file the form for me?
- Do people really fall for this?
- Have they sent this letter to every likely Jason Sullivan out there?
- What's the chance that their claim will be more compelling than mine?
Anyone near Bakersfield, CA want to take a cricket bat down there to ask some of these questions for me?
PS: There's a cute little weasel sentence at the end of this: "This letter is intended for individuals not aware of the existence of the claim(s)" Nice try, asshole. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| So I'm building this chip in my spare time. I'm not really building a chip, mind you. I'm writing the code to program a type of chip. The chip can take a description of a logic design and create that logic design on the chip. It's called a Field Programmable Gate Array, or FPGA.
The chip design I'm putting on the FPGA is a microprocessor, which runs video game code, which is stored in ROMs on the video game board, but will be also stored inside the FPGA (which has memory on it, too, in addition to the configurable logic). The microprocessor has other ROMs in it, too, the differences of which I detailed in an earlier post so I will not repeat them here.
Ok, so there are two levels of code here. The code I use to describe the microprocessor and the code that the microprocessor description runs. Now, for level three.
I'm doing this all in a simulation on my computer (which is pretty damn amazing in and of itself, that my home computer (and probably yours) is powerful enough to do this in a reasonable amount of time). There's a program called Icarus Verilog that takes the code I use to describe the microprocessor and runs it. I believe I've found a bug in this program.
Why? Well, I've got two sets of ROM code that the microprocessor can run. Without changing the code that I use to describe the microprocessor, I run one set, and then the other set (like changing videogame cartridges, in fact, exactly like that). One set of code causes Icarus Verilog to hang, the other runs fine. So I've got a simulator running a microprocessor that runs software. I can imagine software that makes the microprocessor stop, but the simulation of the microprocessor should continue. The clocks being applied to the microprocessor should keep running. Even though the microprocessor model has stopped doing anything interesting, the simulation of the microprocessor should continue and finish. It... well... doesn't.
I can't easily describe my consternation, because it's such a strange problem. It's like having a color of paint that makes people blind, or a sequence of house numbers that somehow strikes the postman dead. It's enough to make me curl up in a corner with my copy of Gödel, Escher, Bach mumbling about strange loops.
I filed a bug report. We'll see where it goes. | | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Subject: | Hmph. | | Time: | 10:54 pm |
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| | Ok, updating the date doesn't work, and "Submit as New" doesn't work. Maybe I can find a new client, but it seems like that sort of thing should move to the front of the friends page. Anyway, for now you can read about my recent trip, if you so desire. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| Just a little note I got from my friendly ISP
From: [redacted]@[redacted]
Subject: Your mailbox is 70% full.
Your mailbox is about to reach its configured size limit.
You have 6145366 KB remaining in your mailbox.
You may not be able to send or receive new mail until you reduce your mailbox
size. To make more space available, delete any items that you are no longer
using. Items in all of your mailbox folders including Deleted Items and Sent
Items folders count against your size limit. You must empty the Deleted Items
folder after deleting items or the space will not be freed.
Please see RR Help http://help.rr.com/ for more information.
This message is auto-generated, please do not reply.
Only six gigabytes, eh? Guess I better get on that right now. | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
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