| Thought of the Day: Crank it Up |
[Nov. 21st, 2009|09:42 pm] |
Thought of the Day: Crank it Up
The weather outside is finally getting colder to the point that it's getting a bit chilly in my apartment. Time to overclock the computer... |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 20th, 2009|12:23 am] |
Why do I always get the oddball ones...? |
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| Fate has a Sense of Humor |
[Nov. 18th, 2009|07:48 pm] |
Fate has a Sense of Humor
I had a fun little "candid camera" moment the other night. Fun for the people who would theoretically be watching, I mean. Not so fun for me. In fact, it was downright sad in a slightly endearing way, perhaps along the lines of "Oh, look at the poor little puppy trying so hard to stay awake but he keeps nodding off." You've all seen that YouTube video, right...?
I was doing a ton of laundry the other night, including some mini pillows that typically require several dry cycles at reduced heat. I started one dry cycle before going to sleep, figuring I'd finish the rest the following day. At some point during the night, I got up to pee (I'm sure this doesn't come as a surprise to anybody who knows me), and since I walk by the laundry machines en route to and from the bathroom, I thought I'd restart the dryer on my way back to bed. I know, pretty impressive presence of mind for what is essentially a very "low-power" Energy Star state. (Just to be clear, I'm talking about myself, not the dryer.)
But I might as well be talking about the dryer, because try as I might, I could not get it to start. I kept turning the timer knob and jabbing the button, but the machine just sat there quietly. Now mind you, at this point I'm way too asleep to have any clue what's going on, and all I know is that my expectations are being severely violated -- a very difficult thing to process in that state. Plus, somewhere in the back of my mind, I remembered some odd behavior on the part of the washing machine the previous night, and so I started thinking (if you can call it "thinking") the whole stacked unit had just died.
I'm still haunted by memories of one of my pillows detonating mid-cycle and killing the washing machine some six years ago, and how I drove around all night, with a bunch of soaked, soapy bedding in garbage bags, in search of a 24-hour laundromat (only to strike out completely and end up stumbling into some laundromat as it was opening at 6 AM). And it was pillows again, no less. So here I was starting to think "Oh no ... not again ... !"
After some tense moments of futile fiddling with the dryer, as I gradually became more awake while remaining fairly incoherent, with sad resignation setting in, I thought "Screw it, I'll deal with this tomorrow" and stumbled back to bed. I briefly visualized the ordeal of reporting the problem to the leasing office and waiting for maintenance to fix or replace the machine, trying to find some other way to finish my partially done laundry, etc. etc. etc. Sigh...
Then as I got back into bed, I decided to check the time, and was puzzled to find that my clock was off. Suddenly, in a gleaming moment of clarity, it all made sense: there had been a power failure... |
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| Winner of the Day: "Out of Line" |
[Nov. 18th, 2009|07:18 pm] |
Winner of the Day: "Out of Line"
Today, I stopped into a nearby Subway at a relatively quiet time. There was one person in front of me, in the process of having his sandwich rendered (or are they not called "Sandwich Artists" anymore?), and another one entered after and got behind me in line.
While the first guy was still being helped, I decided to dash off to the bathroom for a moment. I came back before he was done, and nobody else had entered the restaurant, although the woman behind me had, of course, moved up to the on-deck spot. No big deal, right? She had no way of knowing I'd be back quickly.
But once I did return, the rather obvious, polite thing for her to do would have been to offer my spot back to me. Instead, she just stood there, oblivious.
It's not even that I was in any kind of a hurry. Chances are, had she offered, I would have thanked her but politely declined. The key here, however, is at least to convey that offer -- to show that you respect your fellow human being enough to make a small, perhaps purely decorative sacrifice; yet the significance of that sacrifice is huge.
Although that spoke volumes, she proceeded to drive the point home by yapping on her cell phone the whole time she was ordering her sub. This is one of the most profoundly inconsiderate things to do while ordering at a restaurant counter, and I find it stunning how frequently I see this. By doing this, you're basically saying the employee is not an actual person deserving of your full attention, but just an object placed there to do your bidding. This behavior, and the attitude it reflects, are reprehensible and unacceptable. The only exception I would make would be if you're ordering for the person on the phone, although even then, it would be better to get the order details written down ahead of time instead.
As I sat and ate, I noticed the next few customers were also a bit rude in their own ways, and I would have started to feel bad for the employee, except he seems to have a few screws loose himself. During my previous visit, he had used "we're closing soon" as an excuse for being out of almost every kind of bread. (The place closes at 8 PM. It was around 6:00.) Then tonight, when there were no other customers and he went around doing some cleaning, he spent a good few minutes sweeping under and around the table I was sitting at, practically brushing my shoes with the broom bristles. That's one of the best ways to make your customers feel uncomfortable and unwelcome.
Although that was a pretty good showing, however, it's still our line-entitled, cell-phone-addicted lady who takes the cake. Winner of the Day! |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 15th, 2009|12:58 am] |
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Did I miss something? The web sites for every single one of my credit card providers (Chase, Citibank, and Discover), as well as for my bank (HSBC), all appear to be down tonight for some kind of maintenance. Well, the Citibank site is just broken right now, but all the others are displaying scheduled maintenance messages. Is there something special about November 15th, or is this that random convergence that's going to signal the onset of all the end-of-time festivities in 2012? |
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| Little What??? |
[Nov. 12th, 2009|04:41 pm] |
Little What???
(Click on thumbnail for full-size images; link opens in new window.)
Nice, Best Buy. Nice.
For what it's worth, all the copies had price stickers positioned similiarly. Hmm, I suspect a conspiracy... |
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| Bizarre Electromagnetic Interference |
[Nov. 10th, 2009|04:31 pm] |
Bizarre Electromagnetic Interference
This is something I have never seen before ... never even heard of...
I'm sitting here in ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) sjh22a's office, on my laptop. The radio is playing some "Light Rock" station quietly in the background. Every once in a while, the radio goes all staticky. We pretty much shrugged and figured it was some transmission anomaly.
... until I began to notice a pattern. There was a settings option I was clicking on my computer that caused a considerable amount of processing for a few seconds before the next window would open, and the radio went totally fuzzy whenever I clicked it.
After a little experimentation, I was able to determine that my computer is somehow causing interference with the radio whenever CPU usage goes high.
It's not disk activity. It's not network activity. I'm doing things that are completely local -- even moving a window around in circles -- and they make the radio go fuzzy, but only until I stop. It's has nothing to do with power consumption, because I'm running off the battery now, and I'm on the wireless network -- there is no physical connection to the building.
It's truly bizarre, but somehow, high CPU activity is causing interference with a radio sitting about ten feet away, depriving us of Michael Bolton and Madonna. How can a device with microscopic circuitry and tiny electrical impulses cause so much electromagnetic interference? I thought this was the domain of microwave ovens and cell phones -- but microprocessors?
This is definitely a new one for me. |
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| Thought of the Day |
[Oct. 27th, 2009|12:51 pm] |
Thought of the Day
If arms are called "guns," then what are legs? Bazookas? Cannons? Howitzers?
"Man, look at the missile silos on that guy. He could take out a small nation just by ... I dunno ... walking or something..." |
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| Trying Something Different |
[Oct. 20th, 2009|04:00 am] |
Trying Something Different
As an experiment, I've decided to record an "audiobook" version of one of my semi-recent pieces ("401, mmm'kay?"). Basically what that means is I read it aloud and recorded it. Since voice work is one of my long-term potential career interests along with writing, I figured it wouldn't hurt to diversify my online media presence a bit.
Check it out if you're curious, and feel free to comment: Download MP3 (3:21, 3.07 MB)
I am aware this is an extremely crude and low-tech way of doing it (and I'm pretty sure I could record a better version if I gave it a moment's preparation), but it's just a first attempt. |
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| The Right Tools for the Job... |
[Oct. 20th, 2009|02:27 am] |
The Right Tools for the Job...
(Click on thumbnail for full-size image; link opens in new window.)
Says my mom (kyle_webb): "Is that anything like smoking crack?" Oooh......
(For anybody who can't tell, I assume the sign was originally intended to say "GLASS SMOKING ACCESSORIES." But I think I like this hooligan-enhanced version better.) |
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| Stocked Alongside Barf Bags? |
[Oct. 20th, 2009|02:15 am] |
Stocked Alongside Barf Bags?
From my mom (kyle_webb) comes this scan of an ad from Binghamton. Can you say "unfortunate ad item placement?"
(Click on thumbnail for full-size image; link opens in new window.)
I guess if it was that bad, you'll be especially glad you used protection... |
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| Eeeek! |
[Oct. 20th, 2009|02:10 am] |
Eeeek!
(Click on thumbnail for full-size image; link opens in new window.)
"I Can Has Cheezburger"-style caption: "Horrified building is scared of the dark." |
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| Shout it Out, Yo |
[Oct. 20th, 2009|01:46 am] |
Shout it Out, Yo
(Click on thumbnail for full-size image; link opens in new window.)
Judging from the last word in the job description, it looks like Kaiser Permanente -- with a big presence in the upper East Bay -- is trying to target its job openings to a core local demographic. |
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| PizzaPizza |
[Oct. 20th, 2009|01:21 am] |
PizzaPizza
(Click on thumbnail for full-size image; link opens in new window.)
If a new generation of kids starts asking their parents to take them to the "parkpark," it's all the state's fault. It does sound kinda cute, though... |
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| I'll Second That! |
[Oct. 20th, 2009|01:09 am] |
I'll Second That!
Under the category of "interesting statements formed by the concatenation of two adjacent, but otherwise unrelated, e-mail subject lines"...
The vague equivocality implied by the trailing question mark is also amusing. Like, you should help fight unemployment, right? Maybe? Think about it and get back to me? |
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| Imposter! |
[Oct. 20th, 2009|12:55 am] |
Imposter!
(Click on thumbnail for full-size image; link opens in new window.)
Ohmygosh! There are trees and grass! And 880's been reduced to a two-lane country highway! Looks like they got carried away on those seismic retrofits...
(I think that building off to the right is the Raiders' much-hyped new stadium. And yes, I'm sure you can take BART to get there.) |
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| Toilet Humor |
[Oct. 20th, 2009|12:27 am] |
Toilet Humor
Who takes pictures in bathrooms? (Not counting bathroom mirror pictures -- everybody does that these days.) Your humble photodocumentarian, that's who!
(Click on thumbnails for full-size images; links open in new windows.)
I just hope this wasn't made in the same plant as baby food.
I was standing there debating whether this catty sign above a gas station bathroom toilet in a small town in western NY is more offensive to men or to women -- I'm thinking the former, and that it was probably written by one of the latter -- when I realized the sign itself is the true culprit! Look at those nasty streaks of gooey adhesive residue leaking down the wall! What did they do when they wanted to mount the sign, look around frantically and grab the closest jar of Cheez-Wiz from the store's food shelf?
But talk about hypocrisy at its finest -- a sign posted to encourage cleanliness that makes its own utter disaster of the wall it's mounted on. |
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| The Keyboard Lies...(or does it?) |
[Oct. 14th, 2009|10:01 pm] |
Although I have a well-documented tendency to seek out funny or glaring typos and other oddities I encounter in day-to-day life, I occasionally manage to produce one myself.
sjh22a was recently the victim of a real doozy. You know, one of those ones where the mistake unintentionally suggests something so hilarious you couldn't have done it better if you'd planned it. I caught it and fixed it as soon as it happened, but not before he took a picture, which he later posted for all to enjoy:
http://sjh22a.livejournal.com/134020.html
And yes, that damned Apple keyboard is my nemesis! |
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| The Flash Menace |
[Oct. 9th, 2009|02:19 pm] |
I've come to the conclusion that Flash-based banner ads are signaling the death knell of my aging computer as a viable browsing tool. Which accounts for, oh, I don't know, only a huge percentage of what we do with computers these days.
I remember those quaint days way back when, when I was annoyed by pop-up and image banner ads. Oh how I now yearn for those days. I have not had any hands-on experience with Flash since a web development course back in college, but if what held true then still holds true now, Flash is such a CPU-devouring monster because it vectorizes everything you see in the movie/animation, rather than just representing image data as straight-up rasterized bitmaps with inter-frame deltas stored or, at worst, compression along the lines of MPEG or other common video file formats. Now, I'm no engineer, but as far as I know, all those compressed formats do rely on some kind of mathematical reduction of image data. Yet it doesn't seem to be a complete 100% vectorization like in the case of Flash (or at least, Flash as I remember it). And as such, when decoding Flash, a graphics card is almost no help whatsoever; the CPU seems to do all the work. If anybody can correct me on any of this, feel free to comment -- I readily admit I am no expert on the matter of video compression and hardware acceleration thereof.
But if this is all true, then it clearly explains why sites like YouTube are possible: Flash-based video compression allows a whole lotta data to be sent while minimizing network bandwidth demands, since most of the work is being done on the client side (i.e. your computer). I have no surface objection to this technological paradigm, since it has made a ridiculous amount of media readily available via the web. Yes, most of it is crap, but the sheer magnitude of what is possible with a viable technology (like Flash-based video encoding and a site to host it, like YouTube) combined with a user-driven content model is stunning. Witness my Keith Olbermann/Boston Market commercial example from just a few days ago.
But that's where the love ends. See, I've been hanging onto this ancient hand-me-down minitower box from a former employer for, shall we say, way longer than its intended shelf life. The fact that it was already seen as a relic when it was originally my work computer, when I started at VA Software in early 2004, should tell you something. When I started using it as my main machine at home, I performed extensive component upgrades, as I've mentioned here in the past; but at its heart, it's still the same old beast. And the computer industry doesn't like people doing that. They want you to spend money on all-new boxes every couple years at most -- a throwaway-mentality, profit-driven trend that I have always given the proverbial middle finger. Once upon a time, programming efficiency was considered sacred, but these days it's all about Wow and Dazzle and feature bloat.
My overall system throughput is not bad at all, and for the most part, I can't complain -- until I open a web browser, that is. See, I have a tough enough time viewing content on YouTube, depending on the video (most videos work, while some chunk along at like 1 or 2 frames per second). But some Flash video sites, like Funny or Die, are utterly unusable. All of this is relatively insignificant, however, when you consider the growing infestation of Flash-based banner ads. Nowadays, my computer has to deal with playing not just one Flash video at a time, but rather a bunch of them scattered all over oh, I don't know, EVERY WEB PAGE IN EXISTENCE. This is particularly egregious when I'm struggling to view Flash content on a site like Funny or Die, and off to the side of the main content are -- you guessed it -- Flash-based banner ads chewing up all my CPU power.
This also causes my browser to freeze and become completely unresponsive, mimicking a crash, almost every time I open a web page. Somehow, when all this excessive content (and Flash is not the whole story -- script insanity also gets some blame) is getting loaded, browsers will not respond to user input. They don't scroll, they don't resize; they just sit there like dead windows. This results in an extraordinarily poor user experience. The whole idea of a multitasking system is that it should always prioritize user input and act like it's paying attention, regardless of what it's processing in the background. Today's web breaks this model severely, and hardware "inadequacies" will bring the problem into sharp focus.
Note to advertisers: look, I understand that inline advertising has driven the free web content revolution. It's a necessary evil of sorts. But when ads become such resource hogs that they interfere with the stability and functionality of the system, clearly a line has been crossed, and you're putting the cart before the horse. I refuse to accept the implication that, effectively, I need to upgrade my hardware so I can use web pages with Flash banner ads, and not have my browser freeze every time I load such a page. Such a notion is beyond absurd. It's almost like Internet advertising is now driving sales for the computer industry as a whole, and not just for what they're specifically advertising. Effectively, they're getting you to part with your money whether you like it or not. Funny how that works out. |
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