Punny Picture

Get it? :D

Counting seconds

One Mississippi... Two Mississippi... "It took two seconds." WRONG!

Zero Mississippi... One Mississippi... "It took a just over one second." CORRECT!

Design Sense

This is going to seem like a silly detail, but I was just reading an article about a new program at Google that will pay anyone who finds a previously unknown security vulnerability in Chrome $500.

"The standard payment for eligible bugs will be $500, with a special — and comical — reward of $1337 for 'particularly severe or particularly clever' vulnerabilities."

Now there's the kicker. There's the trademark Google stamp of thoughtful, considered application of design in every little thing they do. See, 1337 is leet for "elite." Even in considering how much money to award people for finding bugs, the spirit of design has triumphed behind Google's doors.

I'm not a huge Google fan (Palm Pre rules!), but you have to admire their attention to culture.

Black holes

Seems like if the big bang was not the first big bang, and it's a cyclical event, then black holes may become unstable once they run out of matter to consume. Once all black holes have consumed their galaxies, and all the available ISM, and each other, and there is just one, and it runs out of all matter to consume, all gravity is consolidated, all EVERYTHING is consolidated, then a new reaction begins to occur, like an engine that has run out of coolant. The reaction reaches a critical point and an explosion occurs that is proportionate to the mass of the object.

Of course, this depends on the assumption that the Universe will stop expanding, and that the weak force known as gravity will gradually mop up.

Thus spoke The Armchair Physicist.

Brain dump

"Well Rebecca, get your basket, let's go down to the wood,

You might not pick any berries but you'll come back feeling good." (Fiery Furnaces)

The Fiery Furnaces are going to be here on Saturday. 'Nuff said.

My boss has an agenda incongruent w/my own. Sixty hours gets me fifteen minutes of face-to-face on the phone, and I'm pretty sure he doesn't really listen to me then, except to determine how to stay a step ahead.

The secret to Szechuan dry-fried beef is to fry it twice. The first time draws out excess moisture. The second fry gives you chewy, delicious strips of beef. Add a Thai twist by dry frying with nam prik pao!

I'm taking one class this semester: Probability. The classes are from 11-12, two days a week. There's an unsophisticated pun it there somewhere.

Cold beer.

I have a couple of really great ideas per year. It's fairly exciting when it happens. Someone with initiative could get rich on these ideas, and maybe change the technology landscape. I document them thoroughly, and stuff them away.

CC's Depot Dogs

I actually went to Home Depot today just to get two fully loaded hot dogs and a Diet Coke. The hilarity of that is just now setting in. At the time it seemed like a perfectly normal thing to do. I was really craving one of those hot dogs, so I went to Home Depot for lunch. Yep, yep.

I think I'm addicted. I could eat two more right now. The combination of that celery salt and the hot and sour sport peppers (pickled peppers) cutting through the warm, meaty flavor of the hot dog is divine. A cold Diet Coke washes it down... man. It's only 1:50pm... I could still get out there and get some more...

Thomas Grandi's amazing turns

Put this on loop, lie down, and let your brain melt right out your ear...

Awesome New Asian Fusion Recipe

I've been working on it for about a week now. I think it's one of my best ever for three reasons: First, it tastes like nothing else, and it tastes wonderful. Second, it's impossible to not get right. Third, it's versatile.

• Heat three to four to five tablespoons of peanut oil in a sauté pan over medium to low heat.
• Add a good, healthy portion (like say three forkfuls) of Tianjin preserved vegetable. (If you've never heard of this stuff, you should be able to find it at your local Asian market. Warning: it's addictive.) This portion gets bigger every time, but I think four forkfuls may be the upper limit.
• Add a hefty amount of fresh ginger - like a whole thumb, including the fleshy part attached to the palm, cut into slices of approximately 200 micrometers. (That's 1/5th of a millimeter. It's easier to get thin slices of ginger if you slice WITH the grain. You don't really have to use the digital calipers, but thinner is better.)

Heat until the ingredients become fragrant. This is the base. From here there are two variations, depending on what you're trying to accomplish. If you're just making rice, then...

• Shred 1 whole fennel bulb into hearty, slaw-like pieces w/a knife, add to sauté

Or, if you're making pork chops, then...

• Add 1/2 tsp of anise seeds

If you went the fennel route, you need to cook that fennel for a few minutes until it's tender. Keep the heat no higher than medium. These ingredients can burn. If you went the anise seeds route, then you just sauté for a minute more. Either way, the next step is...

• Add 1 tsp of fresh minced garlic

Heat until garlic is cooked, like maybe 1-2 minutes, then remove everything from the pan, except for any excess oil.

The next step would be to either 1) cook your chops in the leftover oil until done, and then at the end turn up the heat to give them a nice browning, and then serve w/the mixture on top of them, or 2) fold the mixture into a heap of cooked jasmine rice.

It's really, really, really, really good. I mean really good.

iStupid

How about more grammar?

American Politics Bullshit

"Well, you see, Johnny, we have a two-party system."

"Well what's that?"

"Well, that's where you have one party write legislation, and the other party tries to sabotage it."

"Huh."

"Yeah."

"That sounds like a game."

"Well, I guess it is a kind of game."

"But what if there's something really bad gonna happen, like an asteroid's gonna hit us or something?"

"Well, then one party will try to write legislation to save the planet, and the other will try to sabotage it."

"Huh."

"Yep."

"But if we get hit by an asteroid, we could die."

"Yes, but if they pass legislation that keeps us from getting hit by the asteroid, then the other party will lose."

"How come?"

"Well, that's just how it is, Johnny."

"I don't get it."

Glitter and Doom Live

Did you know that Waits has released a live album from his Glitter and Doom tour? There's nothing from St. Louis on there - THAT WAS SUCH AN AWESOME CONCERT! - but Get Behind the Mule is on there, and the live version of that alone is worth the price of the album, I think.

Remember when we all sang Innocent When You Dream during the encore? That was awesome.

Revolutionary Road

I should have written this a long time ago. If you've never seen the movie Revolutionary Road, I recommend you see it.

I'm not sure how I derive any pleasure in watching such devastation unfold. I've watched it several times, and every time I feel like my soul is being slowly ripped in half, right down the middle. It's excruciating. It makes me sick. However, the acting is incomparable. The sense of REALITY is incomparable. It's tragedy that seems to be preventable, but you are helpless to prevent.

The story revolves around Frank and April Wheeler, a young couple living in 1950s suburban Connecticut with their two children. Frank, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, rides the train into New York City every day, with all the other men in their suits and fedoras, where he develops taglines for his company's products. He finds the work meaningless and paltry. April, played by Kate Winslet, carries out her daily duties as housewife and mother with similar disinterest.

April is more sensitive to the mounting sense of entrapment, and one night presents Frank with her plan for escaping their colorless, conformant destiny: they will move to Paris. Utilizing their savings, she envisions herself making enough money to support the family long enough for Frank to just LIVE, and figure out what he REALLY wants to do with his life.

Nearly all of the characters in the movie react very poorly to their plan, although they (the other characters) don't seem to really understand why they feel that way. Frank and April find renewed love and vigor in their relationship with this new wind of hope, but all the other characters in the move, except for John, the "insane" guy, develop a subconscious resentment toward the Wheelers, and declare it childish, and unrealistic. The whole thing soon falls apart when April becomes pregnant and Frank stumbles onto a new path for success at work.

Kate Winslet's portrayal of April Wheeler may be the greatest female acting performance I've ever seen. It's hard to imagine a more convincing, visceral display to be conducted with such personal investment. She's disturbing and awe inspiring. April Wheeler is beautiful and uncontrollable - a brilliant light, and a black, bleak pit. She loves her family, but is utterly shattered when Frank backs out of their plan to escape to Paris.

Frank is ultimately revealed to be a coward. DiCaprio's performance is equally gripping: raw, sincere, and intense to the point of offending me personally. I really don't understand how this movie did not receive more awards.

As I write this, my opinion on who is right in this movie changes. I see faults in both April and Frank, but I'm challenged to think that any fault I find in April, like that she should not have reacted so strongly, that she pinned too much on the move, is really a fault in myself, as if I am as cowardly as Frank for even thinking those things. April has never been anywhere, but Frank has been because he went overseas for The War. It's unfair to not consider the level of excitement and hope this would generate for April, who is by all accounts a worldly woman who has never seen the world - I mean her potential is obvious and the suffocation she is experiencing is obvious.

The abortion is a very difficult issue, and I ultimately can't agree with her wanting to go through with it. What makes it complicated is the fact that Frank refuses to entertain the idea of having the baby in Paris, so the pregnancy becomes a roadblock to leaving. I really don't understand why, since ultimately it would just be a wrinkle in their plans, but not a show stopper. It could just be a point where Frank feels so out of character in the relationship that he feels he must assert himself as the head of the household. Frank's attempt to exert control over April results in tragedy every time he tries to do it.

Frank lost April when he backed out of the move to Paris. April had invested so much in the move that Frank's reversal broke her hope for the future. She began to resent Frank. She began to resent him with bitter ferocity. They finally tear each other down in a climactic fight that leaves both of them lost.

The next morning April has calmed down, and Frank comes downstairs to find her in a good mood, no longer hating him, and she makes them both a nice breakfast. By all accounts Frank should stay home that day and work this out... Right??? But April doesn't like talking, so I don't know how that would've worked. Anyway it doesn't happen because this is the big day Frank is supposed to get his promotion.

John, the "insane" guy, played by Michael Shannon, is possibly the most sane person in the movie. He is the only person who is interested in their plan to move to Paris, and his vocal disgust at their change of plans ignites the climactic fight between Frank and April. You have to wonder if his so-called "insanity" is affected by the ridiculous expectations and shallowness of the culture. He actually shows no sign of mental illness that I can discern except for his erratic outbursts, but - although rude - they are actually sharp, objective observations.

I can't write anymore about this in blog format. Go watch the movie. Hopefully you'll be as affected by it as I am.

Post-feminist Humor

"I feel about as useless as a mom's degree." - Kenneth Parcell

Ha!

Naivete

Naivete is innocence that has not yet been lost

Karl Benjamin

How long before someone just starts printing T-shirts with Karl Benjamin paintings? It seems appropriate given recent trends toward mid-century modern aesthetics. Hard Edge Tees.

Yankee Doodle

Have you ever really thought about the words of Yankee Doodle? Their meaning seemed kind of pointless to me, until I looked it up in Wikipedia, the greatest online reference ever...

Turns out Yankee Doodle was originally a song intended to jeer Americans. At the time, doodle was another word for fool, and macaroni was an avant-garde wig style. So, in effect, the first verse is saying that Americans are so backwoods, they think sticking a feather in their cap suddenly makes them Karl Lagerfeld.

So, why did Yankee Doodle become a popular American song? It was an Act of DEFIANCE! Which is what makes this such great knowledge to have...

As the story goes, the Minutemen mocked the British with the tune after beating them in battle.

The Wikipedia article is a good read.

Tip for repackaging commercial software

Where I work, we like everything to be in a package. It allows for unattended and repeatable installations, dependencies, and easy removal. You also get to ensure that the software is installed in the correct location on your servers, rather than whatever ridiculous location the vendor thought should be used. RPM is our package format of choice.

If we need to install a new piece of software that someone has brought into the company, the first thing we do is repackage it into an RPM. Commercial software is almost never provided as an RPM to begin with, particularly if it has a really large footprint. The bigger the footprint, the stupider the packaging.

However, one thing about the rpmbuild command that is not very helpful in repackaging commercial code is that it attempts to strip ELF binaries before it adds them to the package. We do not want to modify commercial software, we just want to repackage it. You never know what kind of idiocy is being perpetrated in commercial software. They may depend on those symbols somehow! Or maybe there is a file in the package that is not actually an elf library, and causes brp-strip to choke.

To prevent this behavior, this little trick will do it:

http://www.mailinglistarchive.com/fedora-devel-list@redhat.com/msg26773.html

Just in case that link doesn't last, you just write these definitions at the top of your spec file:

%define __spec_install_post /usr/lib/rpm/brp-compress || :
%define debug_package %{nil}

Apparently Dag Wieers deserves credit for that hack. Coincidentally, Dag is also the developer of mrepo, which is the greatest little program you've never heard of. It creates and updates APT and YUM repos.

Liberty Mutual Lolcat

OMG, he looks exactly like Wilford Brimley.

Good furniture from cheap materials

When I was in Los Angeles a couple weeks ago, Sean and I went to the Art Center College of Design, where Magda is studying, and toured the student exhibits. I had noticed a trend in the creative use of plywood and cardboard for interesting furniture before, but it didn't really sink in until I saw it being used there.

Wood is an expensive commodity, but plywood is cheap. Also, plywood has the added advantage of being a stable material, unlike wood, which will expand and contract, twist, and warp over time. That material movement is why you will hear many woodworkers talk about how the wood is alive, even after it's been dimensioned into boards. Being a good craftsman means understanding how the wood will change over time: size, color, wear, etc.

Plywood also has the advantage of being veneered with most of the best-grained wood that is cut. Yes, I have heard some say that the best grain to be found these days is on the veneer of plywood. So, it makes sense to use plywood. It's cheap, it's widely available, and it's stable.

Being modern means using the commodities that are available in your time. Most people, when they think of fine furniture, probably do not think of plywood or MDF, or any kind of engineered material. They think of quarter-sawn white oak, and cherry cabinets, and old antiques, and basically anything other than plywood. But in fact, there are a lot of creative people out there proving that you can make exciting, modern furniture from engineered and recycled materials.

Look at these examples from furniture makers on Etsy:

http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=26654092

These barstools are made from steel and plywood. The lamination technique the maker used allows him to shape the layers of wood into fine curves.

I could be mistaken, but I think this chair is actually made from plywood as well:

http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=9133184

The design is good, well balanced, and the edge treatments don't try to hide the sandwich effect of the plywood. I like the honesty. The attention to grain detail is not great, I think, and gives the overall impression an amateurish look, but the idea was good, and I'm sure she'll refine it over time, perhaps employing more of the sandwich effect's lines on he arms and legs, like the barstools.

http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=28909515

This coffee table reminds me of something I saw at the Art Center, with its finger-jointed plywood, and even the screws pay homage to the pinned finger joints of Greene & Greene. This a really great piece. I like the curved lines that contrast w/all the straight sandwich lines, and the use of hardware. This guy is officially my new favorite - Holy crap look at the chairs he makes! Spectacular - and affordable!

More good stuff here:

http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=28079839

Idea for a browser addon

Sometimes when I'm doing research on the web, I want to make notes right on the screen about what I'm looking at, and have them stay with that page, so that they appear when I come back to it.

I've looked around and the only addons I could find that do something like that are ones that you have to sign up w/an online service to do, and they keep your stuff so you can share it with others. But I think that some people would just like to have that data kept to themselves.

So, my idea is to have an addon where you can right-click somewhere on the page, and select "new note", which changes the mouse pointer to a crosshair, so you can select a rectangular region that will be the notespace. Then, you just click on the notespace and a text cursor appears where you can type your text.

When you go away from the page, the notes are left behind, and will reappear when you come back to it.

Optionally, you can open a sidebar that keeps track of all the pages you've made notes on, so you don't have to bookmark them - they're inherently bookmarked by your notes. You should also be able to search your notes, and maybe export a page to PDF or image that includes your notes.

Here is a mockup of what I am envisioning. On this page I've created two notes, and I have the sidebar open that keeps track of my notes.


Click on the image to enlarge it.

You could apply nicknames to those URLs in the sidebar so they're easier to understand. You can also hide the sidebar (of course), and also one or more of the notes.

Each note would also have some kind of timestamp on it, so you know exactly when you wrote it.

The note spaces expand dynamically as you type to fit your text, but you can go back and resize them if you don't want your long notes taking up the whole page. When you resize down below the size of the actual text, the text just reads up to where it can and then an ellipse '...', indicating there's more text.

You can right click on a note and select "hide note", or right click somewhere on the page a select "hide all notes" or "show all notes".