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.”

Happy April Fool's Day, My Online Jeopardy Tryout and Living in Hollywood North

I’m some­what relieved that April 1^st fell on a Sat­ur­day this year, as I learned that there were sev­eral peo­ple in our office who were real pranksters, and I don’t rel­ish the thought of return­ing to my desk to find my desk­top changed to a snap­shot of my open win­dows, my new mail noti­fi­ca­tion changed to a fart sound, or other such geeky tricks. For­tu­nately the rel­a­tive dif­fi­culty of doing these things in Win­dows com­pared to the Mac make this a lit­tle less likely, but I won’t count out these get­ting tried on Mon­day, even if its April 3^rd at that point.

Ever won­der how April 1^st got such a des­ig­na­tion? The Museum of Hoaxes has a whole page on it. My favourite bit on this page is this story:

British folk­lore links April Fool’s Day to the town of Gotham, the leg­endary town of fools located in Not­ting­hamshire. Accord­ing to the leg­end, it was tra­di­tional in the 13^th cen­tury for any road that the King placed his foot upon to become pub­lic prop­erty. So when the cit­i­zens of Gotham heard that King John planned to travel through their town, they refused him entry, not wish­ing to lose their main road. When the King heard this, he sent sol­diers to the town. But when the sol­diers arrived in Gotham, they found the town full of lunatics engaged in fool­ish activ­i­ties such as drown­ing fish or attempt­ing to cage birds in roof­less fences. Their fool­ery was all an act, but the King fell for the ruse and declared the town too fool­ish to war­rant pun­ish­ment. And ever since then, April Fool’s Day has sup­pos­edly com­mem­morated their trickery.

I like this not only for it’s nod to bureau­cracy, but also the fact that it involves King John. King John is so deli­ciously bad (he is the King who the Sher­iff of Not­ting­ham reports to in the Robin Hood story as well), and despite the fact that he signed the Magna Carta — he was forced into it, the his­tory books say — he was, accord­ing to some accounts, such a dis­as­trously bad king that the Eng­lish woud never again have a king with the same name. Hmm, we can only hope that there will never again be a Pres­i­dent (who acts pretty much as if he were a King any­way) with the name ‘Bush’ for the same reasons.

I’ll Take “Game Show Try­outs” for 200, Alex
On Thurs­day Night at 8:00 PM I took the Online test for Jeop­ardy. I did OK, I think, but missed a few (the movie title ‘Brave­heart’, for exam­ple) because I couldn’t type the answer fast enough. There was an unnerv­ing ani­ma­tion in this Flash-based trivia test that if you didn’t make it in time, the let­ters of your answer-in-progress were lit­er­ally swept off the field as you were typ­ing, like so much alpha­bet­i­cal detritus.

At the end of the 50-Question 15 sec­onds for each answer (and No, one didn’t have to answer in the form of a ques­tion) test, a mes­sage appeared that the show would tab­u­late the answers, and if there were more than enough qual­i­fy­ing con­tes­tants, there would also be a draw­ing among those. I haven’t heard any­thing since Thurs­day, and I have no idea if I even made the draw­ing. Oh well. I tried out for Jeop­ardy some 15 or so years ago in Boston (in per­son), and nearly made it (or so one of the women grad­ing the entries said). Maybe the third time will be the charm.

My Office is so Typ­i­cal Look­ing That…
On Thurs­day and Fri­day of last week, a group of peo­ple paraded through the offices I work in on Water Street in Gas­town. They were scout­ing spaces for film­ing some scenes for a TV Series. Appar­ently the pilot has been shot already, and one of the scenes involves the character’s father who works at a soft­ware com­pany. The main char­ac­ter is a kid who ‘has the super power that he speaks binary’ (I remem­ber see­ing that movie back in 1969, when it was called ‘The Com­puter Wore Ten­nis Shoes’ with Kurt Rus­sell). So, it’s now look­ing as if the silly TV Show called ‘Kyle X/Y’ will be shot at our offices, because they look so ‘soft­ware company’-ish.

Ear­lier in the week, there were lights and cables every­where on Water Street because they were film­ing the movie ‘Rogue’, an action flick with Mar­tial Arts Star Jet Li. On Fri­day while walk­ing back from lunch, one of my co-workers pointed out one of the build­ings where they shot an exte­rior for the movie ‘I Robot’ (it’s the old build­ing where Will Smith’s grand­mother lived).

While I’m tick­led that the Van­cou­ver Film Indus­try that is so preva­lent here is now bump­ing into my real life, it’s the not the first time that I’ve come close to a film in pro­duc­tion. When we lived in Cam­bridge, for about a week there were sev­eral trail­ers in the park­ing lot of the Dante Alighieri Cen­ter behind our town­house, for the film­ing of David Mamet’s movie, ‘The Span­ish Pris­oner’ in one of the offices in the One Kendall Square plaza across the street from us. We’re not pos­i­tive, but we believe that for a few days, Steve Mar­tin, who was the main vil­lain in that movie, was in one of those trail­ers, about 200 feet from our back door.