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 4th 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 1st 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 3rd at that point.

Ever wonder how April 1st 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 13th 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.