The Blog with No Name

I’m not sure why I keep track of these events. I mean, it’s important to other people who are directly involved, but it’s important to me only on a much lower level. I suppose there is a certain degree of inevitability in all this, and I should expect this pattern to continue for at least a few more years. However, this is starting to grow tedious.

Now that my inner circle of friends has been almost completely conquered by the forces of marital bliss, it is my extended circle of friends who are succumbing to this irresistable assault on Singledom. Once again, I echo my determination that I shall remain steadfast, an unassailable bulwark against that fiercesome hail of Cupid’s arrows. And even as the battle rages, I remember my fallen comrades when I hear of their defeat. Like last week, I discovered yet again that another fellow warrior has kicked the love bucket. I shall honor her (yes, her) demise with this scream (428 KB wav), which also happens to make good on a previous promise.

To be honest — because we should be honest, right? — this is a battle I’m ambivalent about winning. I’m not really fighting this not-so-good fight. However, currently, it seems my most precious of organs can’t seem to be fatally pierced by the missles of love. I’m not sure if it’s because my heart it too small for Cupid to hit or if he ran out of arrows or if he just keeps firing duds or my armor class is too high for his wimpy lvl 1 arrows (there’s some nerd jargon for you). Whatever the case is, I’m simply pulling E&E maneuvers (there’s some military jargon for you), and I’m still trouncing Cupid in battle. Imagine how successful I would be if I actually tried. If I were to take up the Shield of Bitterness, the Sword of Unending Cynicism, the Breastplate of the Hardened Heart, and the Helm of Lost Love, I would be unbeatable.

And, I’m not sure if I could get any more overwrought.

I almost died today.

The roads were very icy this morning. Wait, let’s back up. At 7:30 AM I regetted putting my cell phone number in my work email signature. Some guy on the east coast called me about some work related issue, and I tried to sound not stupid as I answered his questions. I think I pulled off the not being stupid part, but I think I came off rude. It was 7:30 in the flippin’ morning, and I was still working out some Guinness from the night before (Friday mornings are always a little slow for me). Since I was up and awake already, I decided to head into work early. My truck was covered in a thin sheet of ice due to moisture condensing and freezing on it over night. I thought I was going to have to use my spit to unlock my door from its icy grip, but fortunately it popped open on the fourth yank. The roads were very icy this morning. I realized this, so I wasn’t zipping about as I usually do. Infact, when my life flashed before my eyes I believe I was actually under the speed limit while accelerating slowly. I had just turned off Nickerson onto Dexter (exactly where one of my friends almost perished earlier), and as I started to go up the incline my Ranger suddenly swung into a fishtail maneuver. Now I want to emphasize 3 things here:

1. I was under the speed limit.
2. I was very aware of the road conditions.
3. The fish tailing began immediately and without omen.

My truck’s rear was swinging around pretty good. I think it went at least half way into the other lane. Fortunately, I kept my cool, did the thing you do when your truck goes whacky, and had the bull tamed in about 5 seconds. However, had there been a truck in the other lane full of exposed nitroglycerin barrels, I would most definitely have struck those barrels, igniting them, and thus exploding instantaneously and with great ruckus. Furthermore, had a van full of terrorists been in the next lane, I surely would have swiped them, causing them to go into a premature jihadic frenzy, and thus exploding instantaneously and with great ruckus. Moreover, had a car made entirely of plastic explosives been in the other lane, I almost positively would have knicked it, causing it to detonate, and thus exploding instantaneously and with great ruckus. As you can see, it was only by mere circumstance I am able to be here now, relating this story to you.

May I have some more, please? Competition works, and it works very well. Anything that forces Comcast to actually compete would be great. I also like the bill that McCain is pushing. My usual skepticalness of Big Brother involvement and McCain-endorsed bills is superseded by my strong desires for an opportunity to select my own channels to watch instead of buying a package that only has 3 worthwhile channels out of 75.

It’s once in a blue moon we see these, but there is a critical security flaw for the Safari browser. It’s a particularly bad flaw because it allows a malicious site to pretty much get anything to run on the remote machine. Fortunately, this can be easily avoided by turning off the option to automatically open safe files. There is no official patch yet, so this is your best option if you’re paranoid or you visit the shadier side of the International Webtron.

UPDATE: There’s another OS X security threat out there too. This spreads by iChat and Bluetooth which makes it’s threat to the general Mac populace pretty low and is still in a benign form.

(via T3h M0th3r . . of all people)

Mondays are always good traffic days. For some unknown, unfathomable reason hardly anybody drives to work on Mondays. So, I can indulge myself a bit and sleep in a few minutes longer on these days because I know traffic will be good. Today was no exception. Indeed, the freeways were wide open. I was doing 70 the whole way in. Which was good, because I had indulged myself a little too much this morning. However, things took a turn for the worse as soon as I got onto the T-Mobile campus. The parking garage gate was down. Nobody was around. I started thinking, “Is today Sunday?” That’s when it hit me: today is President’s Day and I didn’t have to work.

Oh.

I wrote a haiku last night as I was trying to fall asleep:

Hello, it’s the sun,
Soon I will be sick of you
When you’re way too warm.

My paycheck was direct deposited 4 days early. Imagine the feeling you would get if you shook out all the pennies in your cyber piggy bank and discover somehow, mysteriously, all the pennies had lots of babies! There’s not really a better way to start your Saturday than with the sky full of sunshine, a belly full of cream of wheat, a heart full of cheer, and a bank account full of cash. Yes, I do think 2006 is going to suck leagues less than 2005.

So, it’s cold these days. Cold enough that I really wish I knew where my thermostat was so I could turn up the heat a smidge. And I’m not kidding about that. I do not know where my thermostat is. I can finally afford to be a little less miserly with the heat, but I lack the one gadget that’s fundamentally necessary to get the job done. So, I have to wrap myself in clothes and blankets to stay warm. Not that I care that much, it’s just annoying because all the blankets and clothes really restrict my movement. Good thing I have a microwave so I can make piping hot tea at the press of a few buttons.

Yesterday, I found out yet another one of my friends got engaged a couple of weeks ago. That’s 2 more friends down in 1 week. One more, and I swear I’ll scream.

The text of Google’s testimony before Congress. After my brief skim through it, here’s the money quote for me:

The strongest argument for staying out of China is simply that Google should not cross the line of self-censorship, and should not be actively complicit in imposing any limits on access to information. To be clear, the persistence of severe access problems amid fierce competition from local alternatives suggests that the consequence of this approach would be the steady shrinking of Google’s market share ever closer to zero. Without meaningful access to Google, Chinese users would rely exclusively on Internet search engines that may lack Google’s fundamental commitment to maximizing access to information – and, of course, miss out on the many features, capabilities, and tools that only Google provides.

On the other hand, we believe that even within the local legal and regulatory constraints that exist in China, a speedy, reliable Google.cn service will increase overall access to information for Chinese Internet users. We noted, for example, that the vast majority of Internet searches in China are for local Chinese content, such as local news, local businesses, weather, games and entertainment, travel information, blogs, and so forth. Even for political discussions, Chinese users are much more interested in local Chinese Internet sites and sources than from abroad. Indeed, for Google web search, we estimate that fewer than 2% of all search queries in China would result in pages from which search results would be unavailable due to filtering.

Crucial to this analysis is the fact that our new Google.cn website is an additional service, not a replacement for Google.com in China. The Chinese-language Google.com will remain open, unfiltered and available to all Internet users worldwide.

I don’t think Google is doing anything that’s out of the ordinary in a business sense. It wants to get a foothold in a burgeoning market. It makes good business sense. However, good business sense isn’t always good moral sense, and I thought Google would do better than this.

I think Google should be free to conduct business as it sees fit. I don’t think our government should take any active roles in stopping or discouraging this. However, users and people who are deeply concerned about this have every right to get mad and call Google what it is: just another greedy company. Which brings me to point I think I should have made a while ago. Google really is a good company, and its behavior in China isn’t as heinous as Yahoo’s (which has helped 2 Chinese bloggers get jailed). However, I think the reason this agreement to censor the internet for its Chinese users is so shocking/outraging is that Google is supposed to be that quintessential good company for us geek nerd types, and quintessentially good companies don’t censor in the way China wants them to censor.

This is almost too self-serving:

A body of research suggests that playing video games provides benefits similar to bilingualism in exercising the mind. Just as people fluent in two languages learn to suppress one language while speaking the other, so too are gamers adept at shutting out distractions to swiftly switch attention between different tasks.

A new study of 100 university undergraduates in Toronto has found that video gamers consistently outperform their non-playing peers in a series of tricky mental tests. If they also happened to be bilingual, they were unbeatable.

“The people who were video game players were better and faster performers,” said psychologist Ellen Bialystok, a research professor at York University. “Those who were bilingual and video game addicts scored best — particularly at the most difficult tasks.”

I really wish the article didn’t play up bilingualism so much. My mom went through great pains — literally — to get me to be fluent in another language. First she tried Spanish, then she tried Latin, and then she gave up after French. But think how much super I’d be if I had actually stuck with a language! I would be “unbeatable”! Too bad I died at the first miniboss in French level 3. I have given some thought to going back to Latin. I think it’d be sexy to be fluent in Latin.

However, I do feel better about all those hours I’ve “squandered” on video games, though I’d still say my play time in World of Warcraft is embarrassingly high. . .

(via Slashdot)

I propose a new endeavor for science. Forget about a Grand Unified Theory for physics, how about a Grand Unified Theory for traffic? Seriously, I think this would be a lot more valuable and pertinent to our everyday life than some esoteric theory only 6 people on the planet can understand and that explains how at some awfully specific moment in the spacetime continuum all the universal forces become one. What possibly value does that hold for me? GUTT would explain such phenomena as:

1. Why does traffic suck on some days but on other days it’s fine even though nearly all external factors (e.g. weather, time of the day, day of the week, etc.) are the same?
2. How does that horrible chain of stop-and-go start? Shouldn’t traffic still move at a relatively continuous rate albeit a slow one?
3. Under what conditions does a green light cause drivers to do nothing?
4. Why is it almost always impossible to be in the “fast lane” of traffic during a traffic jam?
5. Why does the “fast lane” always become the “slow lane” when one switches to the “fast lane”? C.f. the opening scene of Office Space.
6. What’s the exact mechanism that causes traffic reports to be given at a uselessly high rate of speed?
7. Why do radio commercials become upwards of 10 times more annoying during traffic than when there is no traffic?
8. What is the positive effect of completely empty and slow moving city buses in traffic?

And that’s just off the top of my head. Imagine what else it could be used to explain when other more bored people have time to think about it!

If I had a sweetie, I’d get this. They even include lip balm! I don’t know why they would do that, but it’s awfully thoughtful!

I found out earlier today yet another one of my friends bites the dust this March. Yes, he will face that most fateful of fates: marriage. That makes 3 weddings between March and August. This is really starting to get ridiculous. I have only a handful of friends in the broadest cast of my friends network who aren’t married, engaged, or seriously dating.

Will I be the last man standing? Heck yes, because that’s how I roll.

I walked to downtown today, and all I got was this picture. I do believe it’s a real school for girls.

(via Volokh)

I love Netflix, but now I might have to use the past tense. I sent 2 movies in last Saturday and I’m finally getting the first replacement back today. That’s one whole week before I get a movie I normally would get 2 days after sending it in. I thought it was a glitch, so I just let it go, but that’s not the case:

“In determining priority for shipping and inventory allocation, we give priority to those members who receive the fewest DVDs through our service,” Netflix’s revised policy now reads. The statement specifically warns that heavy renters are more likely to encounter shipping delays and less likely to immediately be sent their top choices.

Few customers have complained about this “fairness algorithm,” according to Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.

This throttling was brought to light by a lawsuit, which I waved off at the time because I was very happy with Netflix:

A September 2004 lawsuit cast a spotlight on the throttling issue. The complaint, filed by Frank Chavez on behalf of all Netflix subscribers before Jan. 15, 2005, said the company had developed a sophisticated formula to slow down DVD deliveries to frequent renters and ensure quicker shipments of the most popular movies to its infrequent _ and most profitable _ renters to keep them happy.

Netflix denied the allegations, but eventually revised its terms of use to acknowledge its different treatment of frequent renters.

So after nearly a year of using this wonderful service, I somehow get marked as a heavy user and get screwed. The funny thing is, my rental activity is fairly low compared to when I first got into the service. Apparently it’s not hard to get marked as a heavy user. Netflix claims that most users only get 2 to 11 movies a month. Two?! Dude, just go to Blockbuster. One of the nice features of the normal 2 day turn around time is that you know when you’d get your next movie. If I sent back a movie on Monday, I knew I’d get my next movie by Wednesday. I relied on this everytime I wanted a movie for a time sensitive occasion. In fact, this past Thursday I was relying on getting the 2 movies to arrive for a guy’s movie night. They didn’t come, so we couldn’t watch the movies like we had planned a week ago. Now, I have no clue when my movies show up.

It’s really strange that Netflix starts doing this to me after Blockbuster starts to really push it’s online movie rentals. Good thing we got competition.

(via Slashdot)

If this hubbub over the Danish cartoons isn’t disconcerting, I’m not too sure what is. Extremist Muslims have made themselves known for many many years, well before 9/11, but this cartoon stuff is really just mind boggling.

Muslim protests and “activity” has broken out all over the globe (via Mark Shea): New Zealand, Turkey, Palestine, Lebenon, Syria, Indonesia, Norway, Afghanistan and Jordan. Some of these are peaceful, many are not.

More than 700 angry Muslims marched through Auckland yesterday, many wearing black arm bands.

Pakistan Association of New Zealand president Naveed Hamid said his group had organised the march because Muslims wanted to make their hurt felt to the public.

“Something the media has to understand (is that) somebody’s religion is not for insult,” he said.

Also at the weekend, thousands of Syrian protesters set fire to the Danish embassy in Damascus; a Hamas leader in Palestine said publishing the cartoons was an “unforgivable insult” that should be punished with death; and Palestinians threw a firebomb at a French cultural centre in Gaza. There have been violent protests in Turkey and Lebanon, a peaceful protest in Afghanistan and many Muslims are boycotting Danish and other European goods. In Indonesia, up to 300 people invaded a building housing the Danish embassy in Jakarta and ripped up a Danish flag. Iran has recalled its ambassador to Denmark.

In Norway, the editor of the Magazinet newspaper, which reprinted the cartoons, said he had received 25 death threats and thousands of hate emails, while in Ireland the Daily Star joined other European papers in publishing the drawings.

In Jordan, Jihad Momani, the editor sacked for reprinting the cartoons, said his purpose had been merely to demonstrate the extent of the insult.

Importantly, some moderate Muslims are apologizing for the behavior of their fellow adherents (via Instapundit):

We condemn the shameful actions carried out by a few Arabs and Muslims around the world that have tarnished our image, and presented us as intolerant and close-minded bigots.

. . .

We apologize whole-heartedly to the people of Norway and Denmark for any offense this sorry episode may have caused, to any European who has been harassed or intimidated, to the staff of the Danish, Norwegian and Swedish Embassies in Syria whose workplace has been destroyed and for any distress this whole affair may have caused to anyone.

Meanwhile, there are reports that Danish imams are adding to the original 12 cartoons to further inflame Muslims (via The Volokh Conspiracy):

Meanwhile, the Danish tabloid Extra Bladet got hold of a 43-page report that Danish Muslim leaders and imams, on a tour of the Islamic world are handing out to their contacts to “explain” how offensive the cartoons are. The report contains 15 pictures instead of 12. The first of the three additional pictures, which are of dismal quality, shows Muhammad as a pedophile deamon [see it here], the second shows the prophet with a pigsnout [here] and the third depicts a praying Muslim being raped by a dog [here]. Apparently, the 12 original pictures were not deemed bad enough to convince other Muslims that Muslims in Denmark are the victims of a campaign of religious hatred.

Akhmad Akkari, spokesman of the 21 Danish Muslim organizations which organized the tour, explained that the three drawings had been added to “give an insight in how hateful the atmosphere in Denmark is towards Muslims.” Akkari claimed he does not know the origin of the three pictures. He said they had been sent anonymously to Danish Muslims. However, when Ekstra Bladet asked if it could talk to these Muslims, Akkari refused to reveal their identity.

The second of those 3 is almost undoubtably a forgery.

And finally, it seems depictions of Mohammed isn’t completely forbidden or at least is a hazy issue in the Muslim world. (via Instapundit) There are lots of images in that link, so you’ll have to give it time to load.

I’d like to add a few thoughts of my own. First, obviously it is clear the press should have the freedom to print these cartoons. Second, obviously it is clear Muslims should have the freedom to peacefully and lawfully protest these cartoons. Third, cartoons that make a mockery of religious beliefs probably are in poor taste and should be avoided. However, I would never support a law that outlawed or in other ways used the power of the state to discourage them. It should be up to the editors of the papers, the cartoonists, and the readers of the paper to determine what gets printed. It is disheartening to see such a vicious and violent reaction to what really are just bad scribblings and poorly crafted jokes. Should these Muslims really expect any better behavior from infidels? I wouldn’t if I were them. Of course, I’m used to having my religious beliefs openly mocked, scorned, and mischaracterized, so maybe the outrage of something like this could never be sharp enough to goad me into going crazy.