OK, One Meme Post Before I Sleep...

I don’t usu­ally do this sort of post, but it did sound like an inter­est­ing idea, at least on the face of it.

From friend and fel­low blog­ger Tin­foil­ing
The Book Meme:

1. Grab the near­est book.

2. Open it to page 161.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of this sen­tence in your jour­nal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t search around and look for the coolest book you can find. Do what’s actu­ally next to you.

My results? From the clos­est book to my desk, “About Face” The Essen­tials of User Inter­face Design by Alan Cooper (The “Father of Visual Basic”):

If you rec­og­nize that in many cases the user will not even be con­ciously (or uncon­ciously) aware of the exis­tence of the dae­monic pro­gram, it becomes obvi­ous that reports about sta­tus of that pro­gram can be quite dis­lo­cat­ing if not pre­sented in an appro­pri­ate context.

Well, that wasn’t ter­ri­bly enlight­en­ing. But then again, ran­dom­ness is only ran­domly illu­mi­nat­ing. I guess it shows what type of books are typ­i­cally near my com­puter, and what a typ­i­cal sen­tence inside one of them is.

Maybe I need more poetry books within reach.

Keeping Tags and Remember When

I bought some trousers last week at The Gap at the Oak Ridge Mall. Noth­ing unusual there, other than the fact that it has been a while (per­haps 3 or 4 months) since I bought any, not count­ing the 2 or 3 pairs of trousers at Costco the last time we were vis­it­ing fam­ily in Seattle.

Before any­one takes me to task for sup­port­ing child labour in some coun­try to the east, I wanted to point some­thing else out, that was kind of inter­est­ing, and if you are prone to tinfoil-hat para­noia, stop read­ing now.

When I get new clothes, if they are wash­able, the first thing I do is go home and wash them. I just never liked the smell of ‘siz­ing’ or what­ever other chem­i­cals they spray on fab­rics that gives clothes that smell they only have in the chang­ing rooms. In these pants, along with the usual tags and sta­pled on labels, etc. there was an odd look­ing one that said ‘Remove before Wash­ing or Wear­ing’, with a ‘cut here/ coupez ici’ line at the top of the label. Not only that, it had an odd, thick feel to it, a lit­tle bit like those lead aprons you wear at the den­tist when they take an X-Ray (although nowhere that heavy or thick, but the same feel­ing of some­thing that is def­i­nitely not fab­ric sewn into the cloth. Pam cut off the labels and gave them to me (there was one on every pair of pants). I was curi­ous about these labels and what was in them, so I pulled one apart. Clearly, the heavy sub­stance was some sort of sil­i­con or some sort of light metal. I scanned the tag to show what it looked like:

The top is the ‘before’ pic­ture, and the bot­tom is the back of the tag, after I removed the cloth from the ‘bot­tom’. Sand­wiched inside is the coiled flat chip-like cen­ter. This clearly what they’ve been talk­ing about for some time in the Hi-tech Press: a Radio Fre­quency Iden­tity tag (or RFID). It’s put in the cloth­ing so that each piece can be tracked as a unique item dur­ing man­u­fac­ture and ship­ment. With the right sys­tem set up, you can walk through a door with a stack of RFID tagged cloth­ing and some­one can see on their screen all of the data­base entries for the items that have passed through the door. Some peo­ple are rightly wor­ried that these RFIDs could be used not only to track the cloth­ing while they are being made and shipped (and also pre­vent shoplift­ing), but also could be used to track where the buy­ers of said mer­chan­dise go and what else they buy, etc. So much for pri­vacy. For the time being, I’m pretty sure these par­tic­u­lar tags are just being used for these items up until the time we pay our bill at the reg­is­ter. After that they are, as the instruc­tions on them say, to be removed before wash­ing or wear­ing. Nev­er­the­less, the affixed is in.

I Remem­ber
I still, from time to time, read some lib­eral blogs and sites. You can take the lefty out of the coun­try, but you can’t… what­ever. I came upon one of those great ‘list’-style rants con­tributed by some­one going by the login name of Nance­Greggs, a fel­low res­i­dent of Canada (per­chance another expat?). It is really a col­lec­tion of Remem­ber when’s, includ­ing some really good ones I quote here:

Remem­ber when you dis­played your flag on the front porch on the 4^th of July, and you didn’t have to worry about whether it would be mis­in­ter­preted as sup­port for a cor­rupt pres­i­dent and his administration?

Remem­ber when ‘Sup­port the Troops’ meant equip­ping our mil­i­tary with every­thing nec­es­sary for bat­tle, instead of just being a catchy phrase that looked good on a bumper sticker?
…

Remem­ber when you actu­ally thought that the peo­ple in charge of run­ning your coun­try were smarter than you were?

Remem­ber when your par­ents worked all their lives to ensure you a bet­ter life, instead of wor­ry­ing about how bad the life they’d be leav­ing their chil­dren might be?

Remem­ber when the impor­tance of clean drink­ing water and breath­able air were unques­tion­able man­dates, and not some crazy hip­pie agenda to be weighed against cor­po­rate profits?

…
(and one of my favourites, due to our cur­rent location:)

Remem­ber when you hitch­hiked through Europe as a teenager, and you didn’t have to replace the Amer­i­can flag on your knap­sack with a Cana­dian flag in order to be a wel­comed guest in a for­eign country?

You find the whole thing here. At the end of the list, Greggs sug­gests that you print out the list and give it to your chil­dren… “It could be worth a fair buck on ‘Antiques Road­show’ some­day; an odd doc­u­ment that can’t be ver­i­fied as authen­tic, because the mem­o­ries it con­jures up are just too bizarre to be accepted as ever hav­ing been fact.”