Month: December 2007

This is what happens when your kids steal your Clie and figure out how to use it.

So today I was at Wal-Mart buying Christmas lights, and I used the self checkout lane (motto: “Fast! Easy! Fun!”). When it came time to sign the little screen for my credit card, I gave a halfhearted scribble.

That wavy line at the bottom, below the bar code, is my amazing signature.

Funny, though: suddenly a voice boomed out “Please wait for a service attendant” and the little red siren at the top of a pole in the checkout lane started whirling around and flashing. I was curious what had happened, since the credit-card screen said “signature accepted” and I assumed everything had been paid for properly. The happy face Wal-Mart screen said something like “ATTENDANT: COMPARE SIGNATURE WITH CREDIT CARD”. Aha.

The 70-year-old tired-looking service attendant woman ambled over, looked at the screen, and typed in a quick code (without comparing my signature, of course). The siren stopped, my receipt spewed forth from the machine, and I was allowed to go home and hang lights.

I suspect the system is programmed to look for lazy signatures like this, to deter credit card fraud. Ha. Next time I’m either going to draw a straight line, or a series of several hundred up-and-down squiggles. I wonder what else the system is programmed to watch.

Oh, and I wasn’t joking about the motto of the self checkout. You can see it at the top of the receipt.

Ultimate everywhere!

I was reading an article on software engineering, and there was a little random photo in the margin. There are a bunch of guys running around, and upon closer inspection they’re clearly playing ultimate. (The disc is a little white line almost directly above the rightmost guy.)

Cool.

Today was an amazing day for ultimate. The forecast called for balmy 65-degree weather but with high winds; in the morning I could hear it howling around the house. The ultimate gang was a bit apprehensive, wondering whether we’d play or not. But at lunch time, there wasn’t much more than a slight breeze, and the promised temperature had arrived. Who expected sunny and 65 on December 4? What a great time.

And afterward came the wind. I was in Boulder for some meetings and I’ll bet the wind was gusting well over 40mph. It was hard to even walk– I had to really lean into it just to get down the sidewalks.

I guess God likes ultimate, because he let us have a couple of hours in there.

From the Associated Press:

What’s interesting about this is the fact that more than likely the Bush administration will flaunt this statistic as some kind of triumph, an indication that their failed policies over there are somehow succeeding. Indeed, a Navy spokesman said:

I can’t help but think that 718 civilian deaths is about 718 too many. How can we say that the murder of that many innocents is somehow a good thing? One could indeed say this is an “improvement in security” but I think it’s hard to really understand the scope of the disaster when this number is an improvement. No matter what happens, the administration insists that we have to continue our occupation. If the death toll goes down, it’s a sign that things are going the right way so we need to “stay the course” and “remain vigilant”; if the death toll rises, it’s a sign that we’re not committed enough so we need to do still more.

End it.