The Hero

From Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendency --

In Which I Fix My Girlfriend’s Grandparents’ WiFi
and Am Hailed as a Conquering Hero.

Driving Ambition

I just read a brief article from Wired Magazine about a self-driving car. I think those are pretty amazing when all they're doing is driving alone across the desert with fifty miles of open space on either side. But this one's going 70 MPH on California Highway 85, which is an alternate (here's Wikipedia's take on that road) to Highway 101. And, alone? Not hardly. They're surrounded by traffic - merging, speeding, slowing suddenly. Buses, cars, trucks. The car can handle it. It even knows enough to drive slightly to one side to get away from a looming bus.

Sounds hairy. Sounds fun.

Pictures

As requested -- sorry about the lighting, or lack thereof.

Cleaning

One of the things that we said we wanted to do as part of cleaning up the room that our guests are going to stay in was: get the boxes out of there. There being the cubbyhole under the stairs, said hole being accessible through a troll door in the corner of the room.

I just cleaned out half of it, piling it into the middle of the room until there was no more space in the middle, and damned little around the edges. I discovered that a) my mother kept the boxes for anything electronic (one of the boxes is the one my speakers came in when I had them delivered home from Vietnam in 1974), and b) one of the two massively heavy steamer trunks (actual, could have been on the Titanic trunks) contains everything from a copy of my vaccination record when I was four months old to a coat she wore fifty years ago (with the pin still on it) to a set of stoneware serving plates to an electric carving knife that I remember my father wielding (I was always amazed and more than a little frightened by the flashing blades).

And there's still more to go.

Broke

I thought much of the stuff on this page was junk. I will not admit how many items, though, made me say hmm....

Party

It was going pretty well up to that point....

Over Time

In 2007, Steve Jobs decided that the soon-to-be-released iPhone had to have a glass screen instead of the plastic originally planned. "I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks," the article quotes Jobs as saying. it was clear that the only place to get that done was China.

You wouldn't get very far in business if you paused to ask, Why, exactly, was this worth doing? Why couldn't Jobs have had to live with the change taking 10 weeks, or six months, or even a year?

A first answer is that he had a vision, and he wouldn't accept anything less than perfection. And this is supposed to be admirable in every way. Trouble is, when an executive realizes an insanely great vision, the medium—that which is experimented with, molded into strange shapes, stressed with unforeseen tensions—is other people's lives. The executive isn't like a pianist pounding ivories or a sculptor twisting metal. In business creativity, what is pounded and twisted is other human beings.

Same guy? Or harder, less "get the right people, support them, care about them" as the years passed and the pressure to perform grew?



Quote found at BigThink.

Schooled

This morning, I needed to know when the fourth period started at the local middle school, so that I could meet with my mento. Went to the web site...nothing. Odd. I thought it used to be there somewhere. After emailing them to find the time, I arrived, and, while I was waiting, asked the secretary where that info was.

Oh, they took it off, she said. Someone was afraid that knowing when people would be in class, and changing classes, could be used to attack the school.

Have the terrorists won yet?

Insights

Found here.

College

Last night, we began the process of applying for financial aid for my daughter, using the federal form. Along the way, the site gave us some statistics about the five colleges she's chosen. We were startled to learn that the one she wants the most has some dismal statistics. 23% of first year students leave the college after the first year (unknown whether that's a transfer to another college, or just dropping out, completely), and about 10% don't get a degree. In comparison, the other four schools had about a 10% rate for not continuing, and about a 3% rate for not getting a degree. We suspect that it's a combination of things -- it's a military college, which is a completely different lifestyle than most people are used to, and it's in northern Vermont, where it's very cold about half the year.

We told this to my daughter. This turned out to be a very bad move, as she thought we were trying to convince her to drop the idea of going there. I admit, the thought was in my mind, but that wasn't our goal. We simply wanted her to know what the odds were. It turned out that she's apparently been having second thoughts about the whole college idea generally, being not at all sure that she can hack it (she's doing some college-level work now, and finding it difficult). Learning those numbers made her extremely nervous and more than a little emotional.

Both of us assured her that we aren't trying to talk her out of it, and neither of us mentioned the we just wanted you to know part, because that would have sounded like we were trying to talk her out of it. She seems better this morning. After she left for school, though, my wife and I talked about it. Think we should consider some what-if scenarios? I asked. My wife agreed. We're not going to tell her, though.

Cased

I think that most cases for iPhones are silly. And the idea of dayum, look how thin the phone is! loses relevancy when you have to enclose it in something thick to prevent it being damaged. But if I did have one of those phones, and I did want a case, I'd consider this one. Well, briefly.




Found here.

Daughter

Having a daughter - does it always mean going to the same four drug stores three days in a row to see if they have the specific makeup brush, not to mention three different kinds of makeup, that she wants for color guard in stock yet? One time, sure. Two, okay. But three?

Its a good thing I really like her.

Pizza

I'm always surprised by how many food-oriented blogs exist on the net. I look at a number of them, but tend to trust only about ten, including Epicurious and one that, for years, I thought was named Smitten Kitten. (There are several other good ones, but they like to do recipes that are more detailed than I have patience for. I mean, heck - I can't even make decent soft pretzels, reliably.)

Since I've been trying to gently expand my repetoire, I have made some simple changes in what I'll cook -- French onion soup, for one (not bad), bean burritos (surprisingly good), and things of that nature. But when I think I'd like to cook something, I still fall back to standards.

Which is why, right now, the dough for a Thin Crust Pizza is in the refrigerator downstairs.

Tomorow, we bake!

Thinking

Sitting in the comfortable chair, reading Six Frigates, listening to a piano rendition of The Navy Hymn (no, it's not Anchors Aweigh), and thinking about my mother's living room, and how she left it thinking she was going to another doctor's appointment - and never returned home.

Sigh.

We do intend to redo that room before our guests come this summer. (July! I can hardly wait.) The nature of the redo eludes me. More precisely, sometimes I just think "I want to stick a bed in there" and somethings I think "take everything out, repaint it, put down a good carpet, install comfortable chairs and a decent double bed with a good mattress and pillows, have a small television and a desk with a good lamp. Do it up right." And I think Yeah. Followed by "But we don't usually get visitors at all, let alone families -- do I really want to spend all that money?"

And sometimes "Toss that stuff? But it's my mother's stuff!" Which I know is illogical. But that's never stopped me before.

Insectoids

The chittering insect overlords who bought my wife's company continue to dismember it with the apparent goal of erasing all traces of it and sending its former employees screaming into the night. Wouldn't be surprised to find them arriving with demolition equipment to raze the buildings and then pour salt where the buildings had stood so that the sites remained as barren and bleak as their alleged hearts.

Last week, they fired another person in her group, and this week, they announced that they're closing the branch of the credit union at her location. And for the first time ever, in a meeting, when my wife said she was overloaded and could not get any of the three concurrent projects that she's slated with done on time, and asked for help, there was dead silence on the conference line. Finally, one very bright guy said that he didn't have the time to help her, but he could spend a few minutes telling her what she needed to do. It's never happened before that someone didn't step up -- which she thinks means that they're all as burdened as she is. And that this one guy was so busy that even he couldn't carve out an hour or so -- that was soul destroying.

She told me that years ago, during a big project (which would now be considered negligible) she was very, very busy, and thought This is terrible. I'm going to quit when this is done. But things improved, and she didn't. Now she's thinking I really don't care if I get fired or not.

And the ship sails on.

Word Play

I 'm a volunteer editor for the Forvo site. People will sometimes complain about a given pronunciation -- it's hard to hear, or it's not done by a native speaker -- that sort of thing. I listen to it, and if the pronunciation's faulty, I delete it; if the complaint's not valid, I delete that.

This morning I received a complaint that the phrase "Pass Christian" was mispronounced by one person. I listened to it. The speaker had a strong, confident voice with an American accent, and the phrase -- which I took, initially, to be some kind of Biblical reference -- sounded fine. Then I looked at the tags for the word:

Defined tags: North American city common pronunciation, cities in North America using the common English pronunciation, Mississippi, towns in Mississippi, United States, shibboleth

and thought ooohhhh -- it's not a Biblical phrase at all -- they mean that city in southern Mississippi! Which I happen to know because I'd attended an Air Force technical school in Biloxi, which is in southern Mississippi. Almost on the Gulf, in fact. From which residency I know that down there, they pronounce it Pass Chris-tee-YAN-- almost with a French accent. It's an easy - to - understand mistake. Yeah, that pronunciation's not right.

Then I looked at the tags again, and in particular the last one, and thought A Linguist's Joke?

Being Evil

I read on another blog that Google is merging it's 'view' of the world. They announced it, up front -- but they did it in a way that made it sound nice - oh, we're making sure that you have the same privacy protections across all of our products. Only it turns out that what they're actually doing is merging their information gathering across all of those products, so that everything they know about you goes into one place, and then feeding that comprehensive view to their advertising stream, so that the ads that they inflict on, say, Blogger will be affected by what they saw you reading on Google Reader, or watching on YouTube, or sending emails about through GMail, or discussing on Google+ . One big information gathering tool.

I just switched my default search engine to Bing. Maybe it isn't as good as Google, and for sure it won't give me the panoply of responses that Google would, but anything I can do to spit in the face of that juggernaut, I will. And I changed my user name for Google Reader to something unique - one that isn't used elsewhere. Not much, I know, but - well, I do what I can.

Incidentally, I saw a reference on Bill's Journal to a free product called Do Not Track. Here is some info. Looks interesting.

Yeah

Found here.

Ringtone

Very classy.



Found here.

Definition

Pep Rally (n)
1. An school event held to generate artificial enthusiasm

2. A reason to keep a mentor from meeting with a kid who's on track to fail sixth grade for the second time, such reason making sense to the school administration but not to the person trying to get the kid to pass.