Year: 2009

I was reading the New York Times and saw a graphic showing the current national unemployment level, which is 8.1%.

What the heck kind of graph is this? Without an x-axis there’s no way to tell if this is over the course of the last year, the last month, or maybe even since lunch. And without a y-axis we don’t know where it started– was there zero unemployment sometime recently that I didn’t know about?

Come on guys, I know not everyone is a mathematician like me, but really, can’t you do a little better than this?

I just heard Leonard Nimoy’s rendition of “If I Had a Hammer”. It’s not quite as bad as “The Bilbo Baggins Song” but wow, it’s so awful it’s going to leave a scar.

What has been heard… cannot be un-heard.

A few weeks ago I had a million-dollar idea.

I love Mario Kart on the Wii. It’s hands-down the most fun video game I’ve played in a decade, and the whole fam gets in on the action. The only problem is there are only thirty-two race courses, and after a few months of playing you get to know the courses pretty well and have a nagging need to drive on something different.

I don’t know how much planning and programming goes into creating a race course for a game like this, but I would think Nintendo could put together a team of a handful of programmers and have them crank out a new course every month or so. Heck, they could probably do it in their spare time if the game engine is built right.

The Wii has a network connection and can jump onto the internet (so you can play other Mario Kart fanatics around the world), so Nintendo would then make these add-on courses available for purchase and download over the net. Say they charge five bucks, or even a dollar, to get these courses. With a million players out there like me, all willing to pay a buck to get something new, Nintendo just made a cool million. Certainly that would pay for the development time for the course!

As a bonus, allow people to download new characters and vehicles for free.

Repeat monthly or whatever, and you’ve got a sweet revenue stream. You keep your players happy, rake in the dough, and expand the game into something much bigger than what you can pack on a single DVD game disc.

How about them apples, Nintendo?

At dinner tonight I decided to eat left-handed. As it turns out, using your “wrong hand” to do everyday tasks (like eating or brushing your teeth or combing your hair) can not only improve your overall dexterity, but can help your brain… making you smarter in a way, I suppose. So lately I’ve been doing little things here and there with my left hand. I suppose it has the added benefit that if my right arm ever gets cut off I’ll be a little ahead of the curve adapting. Heh.

Laralee noticed my little trick right away (probably because I was having a hard time getting food in my mouth, and kept dropping it) and asked the kids if any of them saw something different about me. They kept guessing, and came up with some interesting ones:

• Dad got a haircut! (It’s true, but it was three days ago.)
• He’s wearing shorts. (Also true, but kind of meaningless.)
• His nose is pierced. (Not true.)
• His nose is smaller. (Possible, but probably not true.)
• His eyes are blue. (Not so; they’re still green.)

The closest they came was when Alex mentioned that I was tilting my head kind of funny while I was eating. It was probably because I was having a hard time getting the fork in just the right position. It’s surprisingly hard to be ambidextrous at dinner!

Anyway, after we finally revealed the big secret, we decided that we’ll make mealtimes more interesting in the future. Several options were bantered about:

• Chopsticks Night. We’ll all eat with chopsticks, even if dinner is mashed potatoes and corn.
• Left-handed Night. Duh.
• Learn a Language Night. Laralee will learn the Spanish words for each of our food items and we’ll learn them; I’ll do the same in German.
• Yoda Night. Speak like Yoda, everyone must.

I suggested that in addition to learning Spanish and German food words, we spend one night each week learning phrases on as many languages as possible. Those phrases will be:

• Yes.
• No.
• Hello.
• Goodbye.
• Please.
• Thank you.
• I don’t know (insert language here), but I do know Bob.

That last one is a tribute to Sarah, who knows how to say that in at least half a dozen languages.

Regardless of how all this turns out, dinners should be much more interesting!

Sweet. We’ve been invited to a Pi Party next weekend. It will, of course, be on March 14 (3/14… get it?) and we have to bring a pie for dinner and a pie for dessert. We’ve decided that pizza is very much like a pie, so that’ll be the main course and we’ll make some Toll House pie (think huge chocolate chip cookie) for dessert.

I’ve got to get cracking on memorizing pi, too… there will be a contest to see who knows the most decimal places, and right now I only know seventeen. I’m going to see if I can work up to fifty by Pi Day.

3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510

I was at the bank yesterday depositing a check and I noticed they had a poster advertising a free iPod Shuffle if you open a new account. Since I already have an account, I asked if opening a second account would qualify, and was told that it would. I was in a hurry, so I left and went back this morning when I had a little more time.

After about ten minutes of paperwork, I had my new Shuffle in hand (they only had silver left– I guess it’s a pretty popular promotion). Woo hoo!

Now I’m loading it up with music, but unfortunately the third-generation Shuffles have some trouble running on a Linux system out of the box. I have to erase the partition table on the internal flash drive, then stick it into a Windows computer running iTunes. The iTunes software recognizes that it’s an iPod and also that the disk is horked, so it kindly offers to reformat the Shuffle properly. After that I can plug it into my Linux box and everything is great.

While going through all of this, I was struck by how downright ugly iTunes is. Here’s the default window on my Windows system:

What’s with the olive green and pink/purple colors? It looks like someone ate a box of crayons and threw up on the screen. The left-hand links aren’t very intuitive– it’s not clear how I can take a song from my collection and put it on the iPod. I poked around the menus and it seemed like they were organized randomly, without much helpful information. Clicking About iTunes opened up Word to display a document… huh? And the interface itself doesn’t follow Windows standards; obviously the people at Apple who wrote it wanted it to look Mac-like, but the result is something that’s inconsistent with both Windows and the Mac. It’s sort of a pathetic hybrid of the two.

So I guess I won’t be using iTunes any time soon.

Perhaps the software looks nicer on a Mac; I didn’t give it a go because on the Mac the Shuffle will be formatted with Apple’s HFS filesystem which is much more work under Linux than the Windows FAT32 setup. A Windows-formatted iPod will work in Windows, Mac, and Linux, while a Mac-formatted one will only work on a Mac. Strange design decision.

Anyway, then I plugged the little silver guy into my Linux box and fired up AmaroK.

I was rewarded with the nice KDE-based interface and the simple commands, including buttons that say exactly what they do (“Connect”, “Transfer”, etc.) and the ability to simply drag songs to and from the iPod. No pesky automatic re-synching which accidentally deletes your music collection, no olive green and hot pink.

Apple might have done a wonderful job on the iPod hardware, but their software falls way short.

I get such a kick out of de-motivational posters.

… So I’m working at home today, and I just finished a bunch of little tasks on my to-do list. Now it’s time to jump into a couple of major projects, but before I do it would be nice to take a little break.

At the office it’s customary to just say “foos?” and everyone gets up and heads over to the foosball table for ten minutes or so. But at home, there aren’t any distractions like that so I end up glued to my chair hacking through code.

Maybe I should go play Mario Kart…

Happy birthday to me!

Me in London, being patted down by a bobbie, circa 1999:

When I went to England I tooled around London for a while and had a great time. Since I thought the police over there have such fun hats, I asked a pair of them if they’d take a picture of me being searched. They laughed and did it.

As of today, if I tried to do the same thing I’d be arrested– for real– under terrorism charges. Yes, that’s right: Great Britain, in its quest to be even more draconian than the United States in finding endless ways to “fight terrorism”, has just passed a law making it illegal to photograph a police officer or military personnel.

What is the world coming to when you can’t even snap a shot of a bobbie patting you down?