Author: cosmo

I’m doing my end-of-year business accounting (whee!) and looking at the year in review. As always, I’m curious how many hours I put in every week. Checking my timekeeping records, it turns out I spent 2,362 hours working in 2008. That’s not counting any vacation time– I don’t even record my vacation time as “time off” in the records. It comes to just over 45 hours a week, which actually isn’t too bad.

Of course my real goal is zero work hours. But that’s still a little way off…

Some guy named Bali Hai (his real name?) has collected a series of B-movie title screens that are pretty funny to see, mainly because the titles themselves are just screaming to be mocked.

Here’s a flick that Universal Pictures probably tries to forget:

And who could forget the classic:

And heck, here’s a movie I’d be interested in seeing just to find out what the Ultra Vixens are:

Clearly the guys who ran Mystery Science Theater 3000 missed a few opportunities…

Woo hoo, the Dow Jones just poked its head above 9,000. Of course we’re still down 35% from the peak last year, but it looks like things are at least headed in the right direction.

The big question, though: can I still retire at 40? In a month I turn 37, so I’m getting tight on time…

I’m doing an evaluation of a software package on behalf of one of my clients. Basically I need to figure out if I can install it on their server and get everything running, and if so they’ll commit to spending the money to buy the software. So I’ve been talking to the vendor who makes and sells the software, and working to negotiate a better deal on the price (it’s very expensive).

I finally received an e-mail from one of the sales reps, and I figured out that the reason several of her earlier messages had bounced was because she had mistyped my e-mail address. Keep in mind I provided my e-mail as part of an online registration on their web site (so it was in their records) and I also spoke with her on the phone and asked that messages be sent to such-and-such address. Yet she didn’t get it right. And even in the message, she misspelled the name of the product.

Sure, the woman was probably just typing quickly and transposed two letters, but I would expect that if you’re a sales rep hoping to make a sale you could at least get the information right so it goes to the correct person and doesn’t have spelling errors in your product name. This software costs upwards of $7,500 per copy and that lack of attention to detail is a real eye-opener for me.

I’ve said it before: it’s the little things that make a huge impact. It doesn’t matter if you’re a sales rep or just a guy like me hoping to make his way in the world: the little things will make or break you. Spell things right. Remember peoples’ names. Be on time. Be polite. If you are, people notice and think favorably of you. If you aren’t, people notice that too.

I actually used the phrase “ja mon” in conversation today. It just kind of popped into my head, and I channeled some weird Jamaican accent.

Researchers at a European research facility called the Nanoscience and Picotechnology Group are working on computing at a molecular level. We’re talking a handful of atoms here– way, way smaller than even nanotechnology.

A snippet from the article I just read:

Holy cow. Amazing stuff. The research is pretty fundamental right now– nothing that’s going to become a commercial product for several years at least– but just the fact that they can potentially build CPUs a millionth (or less) the size of current semiconductor chips could mean that in a decade we may literally have computers more powerful than today’s supercomputers in a box the size of, say, a grain of sand.

So much for the table on our patio.

We just heard a crash outside, and it was the table blowing over and smashing into a gazillion pieces of glass on the concrete. According to NOAA, the wind is blowing at 46 miles an hour in Longmont right now. We can hear it howling around the house, rattling windows and so forth. It’s nights like this that make me happy to have a nice safe secure warm bed.

Mom gave me and Laralee a brain-teaser sort of puzzle book for Christmas, and we’ve been going through it tackling the various crosswords, word searches, logic puzzles, sudokus, and other miscellany. They’re great “brain exercises” and give one a real sense of accomplishment when you finally figure out, for example, what fifteen national capitals are listed in the letter grid.

Every page has a little two-line puzzle at the bottom, so after you finish the big crossword or whatever you can take a moment to do a “quickie”. Of course these aren’t always quick, and I’ve found that many of them are actually harder than the “main” puzzle that fills the rest of the page.

Take, for example, the one we were staring at today: what’s the shortest English word that includes the letters APB in a row? The book even gave the helpful hint that it’s seven letters long.

So we puzzled for three hours, until our puzzlers were sore (heh, subtle Dr. Seuss reference there) but couldn’t figure it out. The problem is that puzzles like this– unlike crosswords or sudoku– are completely open-ended. There’s a huge solution space that’s difficult to traverse. Like a riddle, you think and think and either never get it, or suddenly figure it out in a flash and, looking back, realize it was completely obvious.

Being the brilliant and terrifically clever computer geek I am, I figured out that I could dump the contents of my laptop’s spell-checker dictionary and scan for words containing APB. After a few minutes of toying with the software I came up with the command to do what I needed. And I turned up words like clapboard, chapbook (huh?), and scrapbook. And there, at the bottom of the list, was the answer I sought.

soapbox

Hah! One more puzzle down (with some help from my trusty laptop)…

It’s amazing how quickly the human body (well, my body at least) gets out of shape. Today it’s about 45 degrees and sunny, and most of the snow has melted off the roads and sidewalks, so I decided to hop on my bike for a little ride. But I quickly discovered that the same route I took a month ago without much effort has become a bit tougher. My initial theory– that a mysterious inertial force had made the sidewalk more difficult to traverse– was thrown out in favor of the slightly more plausible theory that I haven’t been on my bike in a few weeks and I’ve lost whatever magic juice powers those muscles.

Still, it was good to get out and bike a bit. Hopefully the weather will hold and I’ll be able to do it throughout the week, and maybe even get in a game of ultimate…

Merry Christmas to all.