I finally got around to cleaning off all the bird droppings on my deck. I learned a few things in doing so:
Now you know.
This weekend I went to the National Portrait Gallery to see the famous portrait of the only man more patriotic than George Washington playing baseball while duct-taped to Abraham Lincoln: Stephen Colbert. Or, more specifically, the portrait of him standing in front of a portrait of himself standing in front of a portrait of himself, hung above his totally-real fireplace during the second year of The Colbert Report.
As fans of the Report know, after being rejected by the National Museum of American History (like anyone really cares about a pair of red shoes), Colbert’s hackey sack skills persuaded the director of the gallery to display the portrait in no less a place than the restrooms just outside the Hall of Presidents:
I can assure you, the portrait is every bit as magestic in person as it was on the Report, with the added benefit of ready access to indoor plumbing. The portrait itself is ridiculously popular — apparently the NPG’s attendance has doubled since it went on display — and is in a comically bad location, with the walls of the lavatorial nook blocking any lateral visibility of the portrait. But that’s not stopping thongs of Heroes and It-Getters from flocking to see it and, naturally, have their picture taken while standing in front of it. Or at least, trying to do so before someone who’s entering xor leaving the restrooms unwittingly walks into the shot.
If you want to get in on the magesty yourself, keep in mind you have until April 1. No joke.
Fun fact: the portrait of Benjamin Harrison on display in the Hall of Presidents is on loan to the Smithsonian from Purdue University’s Harrison Hall.
This weekend Phil Plait (of Bad Astronomy fame) and PZ Myers (of Pharyngula fame) were in DC for an Americans United meeting, and during their down time Saturday night had a meet-up for readers in the area. There were probably around two dozen or so people there, crouded around a chain of tables of such length as to probably not be favored by the local fire codes.
I know it’s somewhat cliched to point this out, but PZ Myers is vastly more quiet and reserved in person than one might expect from reading his blog. I mean, he hardly even killed any kittens while I was there, though he was sporting a shirt I’m nearly covetous of. I did learn, however, that he may be at risk of becoming the god of zebrafish religion, what with his zebrafish ascending to a tank called “heaven” after their role in an experiment is over to live out the rest of their days.
As for Phil Plait, he was at the opposite end of the table chain from me most of the evening, so I didn’t hear much of the conversations he was involved in, aside from complaining about the baggage handlers at BWI and the lack of direction coming from the upper levels of NASA. He was signing copies of his old book, and PZ was signing (or maybe defacing) them too, for no reason aside from not having published any books himself. (Had I had a copy of the bible handy, I would’ve asked PZ to sign it, if only to see what his reaction would be, considering.)
I also learned there’s still a fair number of people on the Metro even at 11:30 at night.
Renee asked for it, and guess what I found lurking in the depths of holly’s hard drive? (Where by “depths”, I mean in a clearly named subdirectory under $HOME.) The novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo 2002!
How long ago was 2002? I wrote the novel in StarOffice, of all things. This was back before OpenOffice.org existed to any great degree. Fortunately, I had generated a PDF version of the novel too. Unfortunately, the quality of the PDF was atrocious, since I think I printed to file and then converted the resulting PostScript to PDF via ps2pdf; and I did that because StarOffice’s native “Export to PDF” feature looked even worse.
Fortunately, the current version of OpenOffice.org has a usable “Export to PDF” and can open StarOffice files. Unfortunately, I had uninstalled OpenOffice.org some time ago, probably to free up a good 300 MB of disk space and because I almost never used it. So guess what got reinstalled on kryten to make a legible version of the novel that you’d actually be able to open?
Sheesh, the lengths I go for you people.
I also kept a log of my progress as I wrote. Look on my writing speed, ye mighty, and despair:
Nov 01: 0 today; 0 total Nov 02: 1,834 today; 1,834 total Nov 03: 2,314 today; 4,148 total Nov 04: 2,062 today; 6,210 total Nov 05: 2,400 today; 8,610 total Nov 06: 2,431 today; 11,041 total Nov 07: 2,093 today; 13,134 total Nov 08: 2,402 today; 15,536 total Nov 09: 2,013 today; 17,549 total Nov 10: 2,455 today; 20,004 total Nov 11: 2,093 today; 22,097 total Nov 12: 2,403 today; 24,500 total Nov 13: 2,824 today; 27,324 total Nov 14: 2,018 today; 29,342 total Nov 15: 2,101 today; 31,443 total Nov 16: 2,141 today; 33,584 total Nov 17: 2,055 today; 35,639 total Nov 18: 2,141 today; 37,780 total Nov 19: 2,269 today; 40,049 total Nov 20: 2,031 today; 42,080 total Nov 21: 2,005 today; 44,085 total Nov 22: 2,173 today; 46,258 total Nov 23: 4,330 today; 50,588 total
For the adventurous, you can read Save Point in the new collector’s “legible PDF” edition. Be warned, though, that I myself have never read it, let alone edited it any, so there’s no assurance of any quality whatsoever. But seeing as how I was posting it on the Internet as I was writing it back in the day, any possible embarassment has already been done.
For those two lazy to read 50,588 words, here’s the four-word synopsis of the plot: “Self-inflicted Groundhog Day“.
I donated blood recently. What makes this particular instance notable is that I learned first-hand why they put a tarp down on the floor in the donation area.
I knew things weren’t going to go well when I saw that the technician was having a really difficult time trying to find where to stick the needle. As in, spent a good minute working on that problem. I’ve donated many times before, but that’s the first time I ever witnessed that level of effort being exerted to find the target. So, either the physiology of my arm radically changed since the last time I donated, or the technician who was going to stick me wasn’t very good.
Given that I generally try to avoid radiological sources, and I haven’t wandered into any Level 4 Biohazard labs recently, I was leaning towards the latter. But at that point, what are you going to do?
Now, I readily admit that I am a wuss. I always make sure to look the other way when they do the needle stick, and never look back until they have the thing over it in place. But I haven’t found any good ways to disable my tactile sense, so I still noticed that there was also an unusual amount of activity going on with that needle.
Then I heard the technician call someone else over for help. At that point, in a moment of weakness, curiousity got the better of me.
Now, as an aside, I would like to remind the reader that blood, like IP packets, does not just get piled onto a truck, but travels through a series of tubes. The standard blood donation procedure augments this general paradigm by running a tube from your arm into a bag. And, when you think about it, a bag is nothing more than a fat little tube with one end blocked off. So, if things are going well, your blood should always be in a tube of some sort.
When I looked back at my arm, the first thing I noticed was that a fair amount of blood was in fact not in a tube at all, but had instead gotten spread out one way or another over my arm.
I remarked, “Ooh, that doesn’t look good.”
The technician quickly assured me that everything was under control, and by the way, maybe you would like to look the other way for a little while longer?
Since I didn’t get a look at what happened after that, I’m going to assume that someone competent got the needle properly in place and stopped any further bleeding. Well, any further unintended bleeding, at least. Soon after that I noticed the technician wiping something up off the floor directly below the arm in question.
So, now you know why they put that tarp down.
For the record, the rest of the donation proceeded relatively uneventfully, aside from the technician having to repeatedly adjust the pressure to hit the sweet spot of continued blood flow without the arm going numb. Which was also something I never had happen any other time I donated.
Plus, obviously, I survived, so there is one thing about the whole ordeal that went right.
In retrospect, I’m not sure I want to know the story behind why, during the screening process, that technician donned a face mask clearly labeled “Splatter Shield” when doing the needle stick for the iron test. You know, where they have to squeeze your finger to coax out a couple drops of blood to fill a pipette via capillary action? I mean, how high does one’s blood pressure need to be to make that precaution necessary?
** You are receiving this message because your @purdue.edu e-mail address
has been scheduled for DELETION sometime after November 5, 2007. **
Considering that I graduated back in May 2006, this suggests that Purdue keeps your ITaP e-mail account active for 18 months after you leave. For comparison, the Comp Sci department finally got around to shutting down that e-mail address of mine sometime last month.
So, in the exceedingly unlikely chance you’re still using one of my old Purdue e-mail addresses for something, you better get into the habit of using my current, oh-so-hard-to-guess e-mail address (hint: firstname at lastname dot org).
The good news, of course, is that once Purdue finally stops forwarding my mail from that account, the amount of spam I get will go down significantly.
So apparently, the Small Press Expo is going to be this weekend in Bethesda. I’ve only taken note of this because Howard “Schlock Mercenary” Tayler and Jeph “Questionable Content” Jacques will be exhibiting there, and at the very least I don’t think Howard Tayler makes it out this far east very frequently.
However, that’s also about the extent of my interest in the goings-on there. I mean, I recognize a few of the other names that’ll be there, but they don’t register much more than a meh. So, is it worth driving down to the D.C. area (including — ick — a stretch on the Beltway and/or a really long ride on the Metro), finding parking, and paying a day’s admission to see all of two exhibitors? Which I guess would involve waiting in line, buying their merch, and having it signed, presumably in that order? (Not having been to a convention type thing like this, I don’t know for sure.)
Plus, the idea of going down around D.C. for the third time in one week isn’t terribly appealing either, but I’m open to being convinced to go.
For over a year now, I’ve been running MythTV on holly, my seven-plus-years-old former desktop PC, and it’s been working out pretty well. Having a DVR is infinitely more convenient than watching live TV — no having to stay up until midnight to watch The Colbert Report, and being able to trust it to find out when the next season of, say, Frisky Dingo, starts.
Plus, it’s a much better deal economically. Instead of having to lease a DVR-capable digital tuner box from the local cable company (and upgrade to digital cable to use it) and end up having to pay an extra $20 or $25 a month, there’s no extra charge (modulo the one-time need to buy a TV tuner card) to running MythTV.
Or at least, there wasn’t.
Zap2it used to offer TV program listings for free for private, noncommercial use, thus allowing MythTV to know what’s on when. Without that information, a DVR is little more than a VCR that uses a hard drive instead of tapes. But apparently they had problems with people using their free service for non-private and/or commercial things, putting too big a load on their system to continue supporting for free. As a result, their free listings end at the end of the month. So, so much for that.
Luckily, some kind of deal was worked out to offer the same information through newly formed non-profit corporation Schedules Direct for a fee that currently works out to $5/month which, while not being cheap-as-free, is still better than what the cable company offers. (And with luck and a sufficiently large user base, that price will come down.)
The only problem is, a software upgrade is necessary to take advantage of the new source. And as loyal readers may recall, things didn’t work out so well last time I tried upgrading holly, largely thanks to finding out afterwards that ATI dropped support for holly’s video card in their proprietary Linux drivers, the TV-out only half works with the open-source drivers (literally: the top half of the image is stretched over the whole screen, and the bottom half is gone), and holly’s old enough to not be compatible with even the low-end video cards you can buy off the shelf these days. After much frantic struggling to revert the ATI driver packages, as well as the X server packages needed to be compatible with the old driver, I finally managed to get holly back into an operational state. I then vowed never to upgrade anything on it unless absolutely necessary.
Which turned out to be this week.
Amazingly, the upgrade went much more smoothly than I anticipated. Sure, holly’s package management seemed to be FUBAR, with aptitude bombing out whenever you’d try to change anything, but it turned out I had just forgotten to roll back one last package to an older version to make all the versioned dependencies work out. With that fixed, upgrading all the software went pretty smoothly. All the software except, of course, for the video drivers and the X server; holly’s MOTD threatens violence if I dare upgrade those, and I know the guy who wrote that will totally follow up on that. I had been concerned that having an older version of the X server could cause dependency problems, since new packages generally depend on the current-when-built versions of their dependencies, but thanks to X’s client/server architecture, applications depend on the libraries that talk to the X server, rather than the server itself (which, after all, could be elsewhere on the network). Fiddling with the nightly cron job to use the new listings source wasn’t too difficult and seems to be working, though it’ll take a little time to test properly.
Success?
Almost. Somehow, during the upgrade, something decided to change holly’s time zone from Eastern to something in western Alaska (which happened to be the first alphabetically in the list). I have no idea how that happened, especially since I never ran into that problem on kryten. Luckily I checked up on holly to make sure it was recording the next thing scheduled and got suspicious when it was still listed as “will record” even half an hour into it. (And doubly luckily, the episode appears to be downloadable anyway, so no loss anyway.)
Given everything that could have gone wrong with this mass upgrade of hundreds of packages after eight months of not tracking unstable, it’s the time zone that got screwed up.
I hate you, Murphy.
Most vehicles nowadays have a check engine light that’s supposed to light up when your car is about to explode. The theoretic underpinning of the light rests on two axioms: the driver is too stupid to realize when something is wrong with the car, and the driver is too stupid to understand what is wrong with the car. When it lights up, you’re supposed to take the car to a mechanic so they can reverse the polarity of the neutron flow (or whatever it is they really do) so that it works again.
(I’ve been led to believe that certain space stations have a similar feature.)
Some cars, mine included, also have a “Maintenance Required” light (or technically “Maint Req’d” since they don’t want to have to dedicate a third of the dashboard to it) that serves no other purpose than to nag you when some internal timer triggers. Seriously. The dealer sets it to go off when you’re supposedly due (in the chronological sense) for your next service.
Given that some check engine lights are labeled “Service Engine Soon”, unless you’re intimately familiar with your car’s manual, you could easily mistake one for the other.
Guess which one of my lights came on recently?
Luckily, instead of running (i.e., driving) to the nearest garage, since everything seemed to be going fine and the timing was suspiciously close to three months after the car’s last major service, I borrowed a engine diagnostic code reader thingy from a coworker. Unluckily, it didn’t seem to work with my vehicle. That is, I’m pessimistic enough to assume that the “E” message stood for “Error” and not “Everything’s OK”.
Fortunately, I had the insight to RTFM and realize that everything was in fact OK, since it was the nag light instead of the “your car a splode” light I thought it might be. So now I’m just staring down a fake warning light while driving instead of risking my life every time I turn the key.
I mean, more so than normal, given some of the drivers around here.
Plus, as a bonus light-that-looks-bad-but-apparently-isn’t, you know that disk activity light on your computer? Well, the one on holly (my former desktop PC turned home-brew Tivo and named after Holly) has been on 24/7 for, oh, about a month now. The hard disk itself is behaving normally, however; if you listen, you can tell it’s not actually grinding away any more than a hard disk normally does, so it’s just the light itself that isn’t working.
So apparently, the moral of the story is, ignore dangerous-looking warning lights and you’ll be OK. It’s a moral we can all live by. Hopefully.
Fun fact: if you file your taxes thinking you owe $X to the state, and a couple weeks later you unexpectedly get a refund check in the mail from aforementioned state for exactly $X, and you contact said state’s tax office to confirm that you are in fact due a refund, there is a chance that the answer will be “no.”
(OK, so apparently I lied last time when I said what the next post’s topic would be.)
Last week I got called for jury duty, despite only having lived in the area for under a year.
Not having, um, jured, before, I wasn’t sure of just what to expect, especially given some of the passages in the court’s Jury Service guide, such as:
The newly completed courthouse project offers jurors a greatly enhanced jury assembly area with comfortable individual seating (no more hard wooden benches), cable t.v., vending machines, bathroom facilities and other amenities to make jury service less painful.
I can just envision an advertising campaign. “Circuit Court jury duty: now with bathroom facilities!” And don’t get too excited about that cable TV, either; depending on what time it is, you’ll be watching either some awful morning show or The Price Is Right, neither one of which is exactly exclusive to cable.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The first day of jury duty, you get to watch a training video about what happens during the jury selection process and the trial itself. The most interesting fact? Apparently, according to the narrator, “juror” rhymes with “bursar“, “quasar“, and (if you’re Andy Ober), “cursor.”
After that, you wait. And wait. And wait. Bringing something to read is a good idea.
Eventually, the Powers That Be decide to do something about those hundred jurors sucking up oxygen in the waiting room, and a bailiff starts to call names for a jury selection process (which has some Latin-sounding name I can’t remember). Each person gets assigned a number in the order in which they’re called, a process which always reveals at least one person who fails at counting and/or paying attention. After a group of several times more people than actually fits on a jury gets called, they get led into the audience section of one of the courtrooms.
This is where the first round of magic happens. Also in the courtroom will be the judge, a clerk, the plaintiff, the defendant, their lawyers, bailiffs, and a guard. After calling roll and swearing in the proto-jurors, the judge asks them series of questions to weed out anyone who might be biased or somehow have an interest in the case. These could include anything from knowing one of the parties, to having been in some similar case yourself, or whatever else the lawyers might have dreamed up to screen based on. Any “yes” answers are explained to the judge, and afterwards the lawyers figure out who they want to exclude from the jury, and out of those left, people are randomly picked as jurors, or alternates, or people who get to go back to the waiting room.
Fun fact about Anne Arundel Circuit Court courtrooms: whenever someone’s conferencing with the judge up at the bench, the judge plays white noise over the courtroom’s speakers. I’d say I never saw that happen on a courtroom drama, but that could well be a result of me pretty much never watching courtroom dramas.
In my case, I went through the selection process twice, and neither time did I wind up on a jury. On the plus side, I only had to go in two days out of the five I was on call for jury duty, and people who don’t get put on a jury get dismissed at noon, so it wasn’t that big of a hassle.
Plus, when you factor in your daily expense monies, that comes to… not even close to minimum wage.
It’s been a while since I posted any shocking secrets about me on here — in fact, I think it’s been almost one year exactly. And since I don’t have much of interest otherwise to be posting at the moment, here goes.
I once had fangirls.
Now, I’m not talking about scantily clad slave girls armed with large fans used solely to direct a breeze my way, preferably while sitting on some sort of gilded throne. Though now that I think about it, that doesn’t sound too bad. Hmm. The Thirteenth Amendment prohibits the “slave” part, but the rest of that would probably still be legal….
Focus. Right.
Fangirls, as in “more than one female fanboy.”
This was all several years ago, back before I had finished BSing my way through Purdue’s Computer Science program, back in the days when I was in the Ship of Fools. Of course, the fangirls in question were in regards to the latter, rather than the former. As everyone knows, there’s no such thing as a CS fangirl.
I can’t recall any other Fools ever accruing fangirls of their own. Why I have been the only one to attract some, I have no idea. I mean, if I were picking a Fool to be a fanboy of, it certainly wouldn’t be me, and not just because I don’t think the reflexive property holds for fanboyism.
Now, lest the reader become jealous of my seeming good fortune, I have another shocking revelation to make. Having fangirls isn’t nearly as great as you might think. In fact, it can get fairly creepy.
Perhaps that’s an overgeneralization; after all, I am extrapolating from a sample size of two. If you have your own experience of having fanpersons, I would be interested in hearing if yours differed significantly.
At first my fangirls (who shall remain anonymous to protect their identity and definitely not because I can’t remember their names) were relatively benign. They’d get excited and cheer whenever I was in a game. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But then they started getting disruptive when I wasn’t in a game. For instance, if I were to be tagged out during Freeze, they would complain loudly. I mean yeah, the “leave one person in the entire time” gag is funny once, but not every time. Especially when I’m that guy.
OK, you may be saying, that certainly would count as “annoying” or “obnoxious,” but “creepy”? And you’d be right, if this were the end of the story. Which it isn’t.
The creepy came into play when I went over to their apartment one night.
Now while my former fellow Fools were likely aware of the fangirls, they surely weren’t aware of this part of the story, as I have never before told this tale to anyone.
Now lest you think my intentions in going to their apartment were untoward, I assure you they were not. Not that if they had been untoward, I wouldn’t have likely been successful. I mean, come on, fangirls. But even if that had been the case, one of the other Fools (who shall also remain nameless, even though I do remember his name for the same reason as before), who was their friend and in fact was how they first started coming to our weekly meetings, came along as well.
Once inside their apartment, I began to understand that my two fangirls had a bit of an obsessive streak about them. For example, they showed off a door completely covered with wrappers from York Peppermint Patties. They also had a bit of an Angelina Jolie fixation, with one of the fangirls having an entire wall of her bedroom covered with pictures of her, with varying degrees of safe-for-work-ness.
But it was when they started showing an earnest interest in sniffing the bean bags and pillows that had come in contact with me during my visit that I officially became Weirded Out.
Eventually I was able to leave with my fellow Fool unscathed. As it turned out, shortly after that incident they transfered out of Purdue, so I didn’t see much of them after that night. Which probably was for the best, at least for avoiding any awkwardness after that experience.
The moral of the story is: fangirls are kind of creepy.
Last weekend the infamous James Randi was in town (for a sufficiently loose definition of “town”) to receive an award, and I went to go see him.
If you weren’t there, to be honest, you didn’t miss a whole lot. Randi talked for a little while, the main take-home message being that we should get angry and fight all the “crapiola” out there, and did a simple magic trick, along with showing how it was done. The bulk of the time after that was a series of video clips featuring Randi in full debunking force, drawn from a TV series in Korea and some relatively recent media appearances in the U.S. (particularly regarding the most recent Sylvia Browne debacle), many of which can be found on YouTube, with Randi and one of the afternoon’s hosts providing commentary.
Since the Korean clips don’t seem to be online, you might be wondering what they were about. One featured a couple people claiming to have some sort of “human magnetism” where objects could stick to them. Randi demonstrated that their “power” vanished when their skin was sprinkled with talcum powder. As Randi explained, the “magnetism” was caused by sticky sweat, and applying that sweat to, say, a piece of wood would confer the same adhesive properties to it.
Another clip dealt with a “healer” who would use an egg to remove the bad juju from a person, rubbing the egg on their body and then cracking it open to reveal red goop inside of it. Video Randi demonstrated how this little trick is done: make a little hole in the end of the egg and squirt in some red food coloring, then tape over it and keep your thumb over the tape the whole time so nobody can see what you did. The “healer” also demonstrated the power to deliver electric shocks to people. A little stealthy camerawork revealed how this was done: the “healer” would stand on a rubber mat and with his foot operate a high-voltage, low-amperage generator concealed in one sandal; when activated, current would arc from his hand to the patient to the ground.
After that, the National Capital Area Skeptics presented Randi with an award, and that was pretty much it.
In conclusion, James Randi is surprisingly short in person.
This past week it’s been getting into the 50s and even the 60s during the day (with a record high set last weekend), despite this being, as my calendar insists, the middle of December.
And if that weren’t weird enough, it was foggy today. On the drive home for work. Fog at sunset? That’s just messed up.
[To anyone wondering why nothing interesting has been posted lately: blame Samus.]
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