So I took a picture of my keys, sitting in sunlight and casting a shadow. And I like the picture, and I wanted to share it. And then it occurred to me that my house key was sitting there, in high enough resolution to be duplicated by anyone bored enough to try… and so I’m not going to share it.
<sigh>
The Oil companies have explained that the variation in gas prices is normal. Gasoline is a commodity, and people are willing to drive a fair distance for cheap gas. So when one station lowers their price, everyone else _must_ also, or they lose all of their business. This process continues until all of the stations are losing money (by selling gas below cost), at which point head office tells them to go back to the regular price. Or something.
This doesn’t explain to me why the price varies by more than 10¢ per litre on a weekly basis, and with predictable regularity. For a while now, Monday evening has been cheap gas night all around this area; then the price goes up significantly late Monday night. It’s been so much of a pattern that it is a ritual for us to pick up the kids from school then go get cheap gas.
This week, however, they messed everything up. Sunday, it was 78¢ per litre; Monday it was down to 66 ¢ (a significant jump down, which is also unusual). Tuesday, it _dropped_ another 3 ¢, and Wednesday it was back up to 70 ¢.
So in 72 hours, gasoline prices dropped $0.15/litre, and then jumped right back up again. The Oil companies claim that the jump is due to demand, but that doesn’t explain the preceding drop. It doesn’t make any sense to me, and I no longer believe the oil companies’ facile explanation…
We shipped our latest version to manufacturing on Thursday, and we all had Friday off.
So of course, I’ve been sick since Thursday morning. I’ll spare you the gory details, but I only started feeling like a normal human being this afternoon…
I haven’t been completely idle; I caught up on some laundry, cleaned up the kitchen, tried a new bread recipe, rebuilt hermione.cfrq.net (disk crash), cleaned up and vacuumed the family room, and probably other stuff too. I also watched way too much TV (mainly Space, HGTV, and DVDs). All in all, a reasonably relaxing time…
world subways – subway systems of the world, presented on the same scale. I’m sure it’ll be depressing when he gets around to adding Toronto…
See 19 of the world’s major subway/tube networks mapped at the same scale
This site puts London’s subway system into perspective. Toronto and San Francisco are not there yet but are promised shortly.
This book could be an interesting read:
Amazon.ca: Books: Who Really Matters: the Core Group Theory of Power, Privilege, and Success
bq. “a depressing number of business corporations have evolved into organizations with one primary purpose: To extract wealth from all constitutions (not just the shareholders, but the employees, customers, and neighbors as well) and give it essentially to the children and grandchildren of some of its senior executives.”
(via “Rodent Regatta”:http://www.rodentregatta.com/archives/005758.php)
Maybe I’m punchy from my deadlines, but I laughed and laughed when I saw this…
Finally, porn that is Safe For Work.
(via “memepool”:http://www.memepool.com/.)
It was so nice out this morning, I drove all the way to work with the windows rolled down and the radio cranked up…
Someone recently recommended that we pull the kids out of hockey, purchase a membership at a ski club, and go skiing during the winter instead. The advantage being that skiing is something that we can all do together, as a family.
I like the idea; I like skiing, and Gareth’s pretty good for an 8-year old. Charlotte has a lot of trouble with skates (she has wonky ankles), so I don’t see hockey in her future. But Gareth really likes hockey, and it’s got all that teamwork stuff going for it :-), so I’m kinda undecided on the whole issue…
I certainly like skiing more than hockey.
However… Skiing requires some traveling to the mountain, and hockey can be right in town.
This weekend, millions of people around here simultaneously viewed a strange glowing orb in the sky. It appeared in the east, and gradually moved across the sky as the day passed, eventually disappearing in the west. I’m sure there was general panic; human sacrifice, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria…
Even better, the air temperature was above the freezing temperature of water! A miracle!
I think this is the earliest I’ve ever given up on winter (and I have one more ski date planned for Saturday :-). I think it was the ridiculously cold January that we had this year.
In “Comes in Two Sizes”:http://www.third-bit.com/~gvwilson/blog/archives/000029.html Greg Wilson comments on Wiki technology.
One of the frustrations I find with wiki software (and, actually, open source software in general) is the proliferation of almost identical versions of a tool. There are too many wiki implementations out there, and each one seems to have one or two good features, but is also missing one or two important features.
TWiki is too large and feature-rich (and has a weird hybrid version of Wiki syntax), but it has real authentication (unlike most of the others) and has a working XML-RPC interface (useful for integrating with, say, movable type :-), so that’s why it is installed.
On the other hand, I’m using MoinMoin at work, because I don’t need authentication there, and it is easier to setup and use.
Anyway, what I’m really looking for for things like “the rolemaster pages”:http://www.cfrq.net/~rolemaster/ is a Content Management System that makes it easy for the casual user to create linked documents. This means, for example, that it should use Textile or Wiki syntax for editing. But the most important feature for me would be to extend the power of WikiWords to arbitrary phrases or keywords. For example, if I create a document with the title “Greg Wilson”, I’d like any instance of the string “Greg Wilson” to be replaced with a hyperlink. This makes it trivial to create content; just create the page, rebuild, and every reference to the topic will be magically linked, without using WikiWords. (The problem with WikiWords is that you have to remember to use them, and they don’t always fit comfortably. My Rolemaster characters don’t have last names, for example, so I’d have to name Alex as AlEx, or CharacterAlex, or something similar to get standard wikis to work).
WordPress comes close; there’s a plugin for keyword processing that could probably be extended to dynamically generate the list of keywords from the database. If only I had some time to play :-)
Hm, can’t tell if all of the posting was by you or by Greg Wilson, and I’m too lazy to clikc the link, so there you go.
If you have a work that isn’t InterCaps, you can (with TWiki anyway) use a syntax like [[wiki][text]] which will use the ‘wiki’ part as the link href, and display it as ‘text’. So to be bizarre about it, you *could* use [[Alex][Alex]]. :-)
We’ve been pushing to get a release out the door for the end of the month, so things have been very hectic; lots of bugs to fix, and many interrupts during the day by other developers trying to get _their_ bugs fixed. (That’s not a complaint; I’d rather they ask questions than disappear down paths I’ve already ruled out in the past :-).
Over the last two weeks (!!) I have spent my mental capacity chasing down an obscure resource leak. It took me too long to get a test harness set up, and then I ran down several dead ends before finally narrowing the problem down to a few lines of code. There were a couple of things I could have done better, but mostly I was plagued by dumb problems causing delays (the version of our software I needed to debug crashes our customized XP desktops; our Win2K+DevStudio ghost images don’t work inside Microsoft Virtual PC; We had a lot of trouble getting our license servers for purify to actually serve licenses; purify refused to deal with _one_ DLL; etc. etc.)
Tracking this down meant I missed a ski day with my son. Fortunately we’re going skiing as a family soon, so it wasn’t the _last_ day…
I haven’t felt much like ranting lately; there are too many targets, and I’m feeling more apathy than usual about all of them. It took me three days to even find out there was a “sponsorship scandal” going on in Canada, and I’m _still_ not clear on the details; that’s how disconnected I am :)
I did take some interesting sunrise pictures while driving to work the other day, but I haven’t even copied them out of the camera yet. Maybe this weekend I’ll find some time to play. In between loads of laundry, probably…
My MP3 player on shuffle mode just played “Don McClean – American Pie”:http://www.don-mclean.com/ and “Weird Al Yankovic – The Saga Begins”:http://www.google.com/search?q=weird+al+yankovic+saga+begins back to back…
Jeff K says: I practically circled around a local square and met a quadratrix at one of the trisections.
That was a quote from Willow Rosenberg, btw; it’s evil Willow from the “third season”:http://www.tvtome.com/tvtome/servlet/EpisodeGuideSummary/showid-10/season-3/ episode “The Wish”:http://www.tvtome.com/tvtome/servlet/GuidePageServlet/showid-10/epid-43/ . It goes with “This is the part that’s less fun. When there isn’t any screaming.” :-)
There’s a Willow fan site titled “Bored Now”:http://www.borednow.envy.nu/, and I found sound clips at “Willow Sounds”:http://dogwood.phpwebhosting.com/~tvshrine/willow.htm.
“Bored now.”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/archives/000233.html
Sorry it’s boring you – what would make it exciting? More comments? ;-)
For twenty-five points, what 80s pop lyricist wrote:
“Life was easier when it was boring.”
As for “bored now”, yeah, I think blogs need to scratch an itch. Raymond Chen keeps writing “The Old New Thing” to explore how we got here (where “here” is the current tangle of Microsoft technologies). Jon udell blogs because he gets paid to write about the bleeding edge, and the only way to do that is to play there. Miles Thibault (student of mine at U of T) has just started a blog (on my orders) where he’ll write about his explorations of C-Python’s implementation, and so on. So, what’s your itch?
Debbie says: (The Following Is A Completely Unedited Response Dictated Through Viavoice; Lack Of Editing Was Prompted By The Unfortunate Discovery That “Press Delete” Is Sometimes Misinterpreted As “Press Escape”, Which In Livejournal And Mt Comments Has Disastrous Consequences. Apologies In Advance For Incomprehensibility. )
Now that was interesting; why would ViaVoice capitalize that macro?
Anyway, I’ve been blocking for about seven years knell endive fine to the my interest comes and goes. I have found that adding photos makes it more interesting for me, as well as giving myself an assignment topic.
For me, however, one of the major incentives (before my tendinitis made it hard to write as quickly as I think because I have to use ViaVoice) Was to improve my writing and my ability to write even when I didn’t feel like writing. the latter is an extremely useful skill for someone who writes for a living, especially magazine writing.
what are your favorite kinds of entries, the ones you most in choy writing? Perhaps you could focus on those kinds of entries.
Wow, I have no idea how much of the above is going to be understandable. :-)
Apologies for this completely contentless comment whose sole purpose is to enable me to enter my correct personal posting information for future use.
and of course I entered it incorrectly. Here’s another attempt.
While were on the topic of movable type comments, have you had any problems with spam postings in your comment sections (not counting mine, of course :-)). I’m starting to encounter them more, comments masquerading as actual remarks about my blog, but in truth are just links to commercial sites.
Here you go: yet another “solve problems on a grid” puzzle game (remember “Dyson’s Telescope”:http://www.dyson.co.uk/game/default.asp ?):
Chromatron, by Silver Spaceship Software is a free game of laser beams and mirrors.
-_*Update*_: Help, I’m stuck on level 30!-
_*Update*_: Ok, I got past level 30. It was ugly :-).
I had four or five levels left near the top, and they were all trial-and-error stuff; if I plugged away at them hard enough, I’d be able to solve them, but there was no satisfaction in doing so. So I went to “a solutions site”:http://www.republika.pl/chroma/ and cleared off my game, so that I’d stop wasting time on it :-)
aep says: You are evil for posting this URL. I downloaded the game at work and wasted over 2 hours. I’m up to level 25.
aep says: I got level 30. Do you want a hint?
I find it depressing that I own one, and have read none, of the Locus Online: 2003 Recommended Reading list.
(Paladin of Souls, since you asked).
When I read “Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/067977548X by James Gleick, one of the anecdotes that struck me was about people who would type 88 seconds instead of 90 seconds on microwave keypads, because it’s faster. So I laughed when I saw this:
bq. I read once of a person who would microwave their coffee for some unusual amount of time, like 48 seconds. I think it was a brain teaser: why would the person do this?
bq. The answer was that they had timed the spinning of the carousel in the microwave, and knew that if they zapped it for 48 seconds, the mug would make some number of whole revolutions, and end up with the handle pointing towards them, making it easier for them to pick the mug up again.
(via Ned Batchelder)
I’m pretty sure these are correct; my ‘visited countries’ and ‘visited states’ maps:
create your own visited countries map
or vertaling Duits Nederlands
create your own visited country map
Update: Greg asked about provinces. I’ve been everywhere _except_ Alberta, Manitoba, and the Territories…
When did you get to all those states? And from the world map it looks as if you went to some small islands off the coast of Argentina and to Corsica. You’re more of a traveller than I thought!
California and Nevada are easy; been there several times. Washington: a west-coast Canada vacation included a trip to Seattle (and Roslyn :-). Illinois and Ohio were amusement park trips. Indiana – family. New England – camping trip. DC – well, you were there for that one… SE states: various winter vacations. Texas and Tenn. – IETF meetings.
The countries are mostly from our whirlwind tour with Gareth 5 years ago. As for the little islands, I think they get coloured by the European country that claims them; I’ve never been south of the Equator….
What, no province-by-province breakdown?
Jeff K says: I think this mapping system is a bit unfair. I’ve been to every province and every state except about 7 [Yukon,Nunavut,Kansas?,Arkansas?,Vermont,New Hamshire,Maine, Alaska], but I don’t think any of us should claim a state without say, having visited some important landmark there, and in a big state like Texas, perhaps several. I’d say California can only be claimed with a trip to San Diego, Los Angeles, San Fran, Mt. Shasta, Death Valley & Yosemite [and I claim same]. Hm, and without Thunder Bay, Sudbury, Timmins, Ottawa, Algonquin, Toronto, London, Waterloo, Petrolia, I would scratch Ontario off anyone’s list too. Ditto for Quebec without Radisson, Val d’Or, Gaspe, Montreal, Quebec City and Hull [or just claim regions visited]. Oh and you didn’t list “Wright Patterson Air Force” base for Ohio, so you only get to claim the northern part of Ohio. No Area 51 in Nevada? Then you only get the little corner with Vegas. So there.
I’m not entirely sure what to think of this:
* [H]ard|Forum – Matrimony Mod
He built a computer to propose to his girlfriend; the case (and interior!) are decorated in a bridal theme. It’s actually pretty cool as a craft project, but a _computer_? I dunno…
I guess the important part is that she said yes :-)
Debbie says: swoon, talk about technonerdboy romance! :-)
As usual, “Chuq nails it”:http://www.plaidworks.com/chuqui/blog/001248.html:
bq. Why the US is heavily subsidizing sugar growers while artificially limiting access to global sugar to prop up prices, while at the same time planning to heavily spend on new programs to fight obesity, caused in at least way by too much sugar in the typical US diet?
This in response to a “plastic article”:http://www.plastic.com/article.html;sid=04/01/22/07233695 . It seems the WHO is trying to reduce world sugar consumption, as we learn that it is a contributor to obesity. The US response seems to be the same as their response to global warming: “There’s no evidence!”. William Steiger writes:
bq. that there is no robust evidence linking sugar consumption to rising obesity levels and that diet has to be a matter of personal choice. Steiger wrote ‘There is also an unsubstantiated focus on ‘good’ and ‘bad’ foods, and a conclusion that specific foods are linked to non-communicable diseases. The assertion that the heavy marketing of energy-dense foods or fast food outlets increases the risk of obesity is supported by almost no data.’
I always thought that this is exactly the kind of thing that governments should be meddling in. Sadly, people do need to be protected from themselves (with education, if nothing else), and goverments are in a unique position to do that. And, after all, the same governments tax revenue is paying all the health costs of obesity, so you think there’d be a bottom-line incentive too. (Well, ok, there is, but it involves re-election, not tax dollars.)
I guess I’d make a lousy libertarian :-)
Paying the +15% rates Wed->Sat is just another tax on the stupid like smokes, caffeine, lotteries, bingo, casinos, beer, aspartame, Prozac, Zoloft & Windows. The Users don’t know any better and they *like* it!