Les Bonnes Choses

I worked from home today -- inasmuch as one can work from home when a preschooler is home on March break. I've got a poster to present at the upcoming CNS conference in Montreal in just a few weeks, so I thought I should get around to starting it.

Based on the title of this entry and the way I started this entry, you're probably thinking I was going to tell you about my poster. But then you'd realize that describing a neuroscience poster the day after commenting on a legal matter would be blogger suicide, and I'd lose the three readers I've managed to keep since I started slacking off. So instead, I'm going to tell you about Jude's first academic poster presentation.

Jude was asking me what I was doing on the computer, and when I told him I was working on a poster, he decided he wanted to do one too. When I asked him what it should be about, he said it should be about a topic we recently shared a few giggles about. In the past, Jude has asked about why he has to eat his dinner. And he's asked about why we poop. Always looking to connect lessons together, I explained how the food that he eats goes into his belly where it's broken up into little bits and goes into pipes running all over his body where it can fix his boo-boos (he's got some sores where he was scratching an allergic rash). The leftovers, I explained, turn into poop. And that's what his poster is about. I took the liberty of highlighting the words food, belly, fix and poop. The accompanying graphic depicts an apple going into the belly. You can probably find the poop for yourself. Other than my insistence that the poop go into the green potty, and helping him spell belly, it's all delightfully done by his hand.

All comparisons were significant at the p=.05 level.

I was reading in the news this week about a class action lawsuit shaping up against Toyota. The charge is that the company's failure to remedy safety concerns in their vehicles is negatively affecting the resale value of these vehicles. A similar lawsuit was filed against GM a few years back, I think, though I can't be sure and I don't know the outcome because my quick Google search on the topic of class action lawsuits concerning vehicle resale values was flooded by the more recent Toyota-related news.

Though it is most likely that we will drive our 10 month old Rav4 into the ground, resale value was one of the factors I considered when we bought our car last year. Still, I'm not sure how these class action lawsuits work. I mean, I get it in principle, but it seems like bulk of the payout goes to the lawyers. I don't know that adding my name to a lawsuit for a $50 cheque that will cost Totota $1000 to write fits in my model of justice.

I used to pay attention to the weather. Then I moved to a place where the temperature was quoted in Farenheit and was meaningless without extra calculation (C = (F-32) * 9/5). So I stopped paying attention to the weather forecast and am consequently appalled -- but not surprised -- by today's return to snow. If you live above a certain latitude, you will inevitably ask yourself once a year whether it is safe to put away your hats, mitts, boots and overcoats until the fall. And if you have lived above a certain latitude long enough, you will know that the first time you ask yourself that question the answer is "no."

So, unlike yesterday, today is not an appropriate day to hang any laundry out to dry on the makeshift clothesline I ran between two trees in the back yard. Not that we have much laundry to hang, on account of the broken washing machine and all. We did dig through some of our laundry mountain, however, thanks to Amy's washing facilities. We (Amy, actually) loaded up three of the four laundry bags into three of the four washing machines in her apartment yesterday morning just before lab meeting. Through luck of the draw, the one bag of laundry that did not get washed was the one containing my *ahem* panties. After a phone call last evening in which the word commando was tossed around more than once, Amy was good enough to throw that last bag of laundry into an available machine, and then call Rebecca to pick it up on her way out to the bookstore.

I don't know how many readers out there work with someone (not a spouse or family member) who have washed their underwear, but it's further evidence that academics breeds strange work environments.

I came home yesterday afternoon in the middle of a laundry cycle that never ended. Sitting in the dinette, I thought to myself, "the washing machine sure is taking a long time to fill." As it turned out, it was taking a long time to fill because the water pouring in through the top of the machine was pouring directly out of the bottom of the machine. This is not the first time we have tested the throughput of the laundry room floor drains, but I'm certain it was the most intensive test yet.

So an email was sent out and a call was placed to a repairman; the repairman was called off and the house now has a new stackable washer/dryer set to be delivered on Monday. In the meantime, we have a considerable backlog of laundry to be done, and will hopefully avail ourselves of Amy's laundry facilities (unlike any other building complex I have seen, her laundry facilities are not coin-op).

I wish it were otherwise, but there really is nothing funny at all about laundry, and it's hard to be clever about a load of towels.

I've currently got a shell script doing a bunch of tedious stuff for me. So while I have some CPU doing my work for me, I thought it would be a good opportunity to blag.

On Monday, Rebecca and I went to a movie theatre alone for the first time in ages. We saw the 3D showing of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (the verdict: it was okay and obvious to someone like me who had not read the book that it was a Hollywood adaptation). And during the trailers, it became apparent that a very large proportion of upcoming movies are going to be 3D. It seemed gratuitous.

Fast forward to today when I read this story on the CBC.ca website about a Montreal movie pirate who made high-quality copies of movies in movie theatres. That's when it occurred to me that maybe all this 3D movie business is actually a friendlier copy protection. I doubt a digital camera is sensitive to the polarized light used in 3D projections. And even if you could capture the 3D effect in your digital copy, if someone dropped $10K on some high-end equipment so that they could watch some downloaded movies for free:


So my prediction: More 3D movies, less piracy.

Gmail does a pretty good job at catching spam email. My junk email folder is usually chock-full of emails allegedly sent to myself, albeit with my name changed to Viagra Pharmacy.

I miss procmail.

Anyways, one problem that I have is that gmail's false detection rate (the frequency with which gmail labels legitimate email as spam) is above zero. Thus, as long as there is any chance that an important email is going to be routed into my junk mail, I have to sift through everything in my junk mail folder anyways, thereby defeating the purpose of having a spam folder at all.

There was a time when I received very little spam, owing to the fact that I reserved my gmail account for communication with individuals and used my hotmail account for website registrations and communication with faceless corporate entities most likely to sell my email address (incidentally, don't bother emailing my hotmail account, because the message is extremely unlikely to be read). The actual system was a bit more complicated than that, because I also had two academic email accounts provided by the university which I tended to use for school-related emails or to other academics or academic organizations. This system worked generally well until about two years ago when I used my gmail account in correspondence with the organizing committee for my high school reunion. Someone affiliated with the committee thought it would be extremely helpful to post the email addresses of all the prospective attendees to a website (now mercifully offline and not archived in the internet archive). After John pointed this out to me, an email request to remove my email address sent the website's maintainer, Keith Mills, was ignored, and my gmail account received a sharp uptick in the quantity of spam received.

So, Mr. Mills, should I ever see you in the streets, I hope for your sake you are wearing a protective cup, because I will kick you in the junk.

A family friend was laid to rest today. Jerry Dufresne was my confirmation sponsor, which, in the Catholic church, is kind of like getting a second godfather. Over the weekend, his oldest son and long-time friend Matt used facebook to organize a memorial, and asked for pictures anyone might have of his dad. My mom was visiting with us at the time and, having become addicted to collecting photographs, was eager to search through her photo archives. At the time, she worried that she didn't think she had many photos of just Jerry. That immediately struck me as unsurprising because Jerry was always around friends. So if I may offer some unsolicited advice, it's this: if it's difficult to find a picture of you that doesn't show you sharing a laugh with at least one good friend, you've done well in life.

Get back to blogging. My liver and I miss your drink of the day.

I only applied to one school this year, but I found this morning that they had no need for me. The upside for y'all is that this year's self-pity season is mercifully short. This next year should be pretty productive though, so I should hopefully rock the next round of applications.

I was in London this past weekend, catching up with some friends, and watching the grand finale of a fine olympic season. For the two weeks previous, Rebecca had the kids in London while she attended rehearsals for a big concert, surely nabbing her the title of the chorister with the longest commute. We talked over skype most evenings, though Jude was often in bed by the time we chatted, so I didn't see quite as much of him. On one occasion, however, he was still up when I called over. Despite not having seen me for a week, he wasn't interested in appearing on the computer. Rather, he was going about his business playing with his cars.

Playing cars with Jude is a structured event: when he asks you to play with him, he has a specific role in mind. In this particular instance, he wanted Rebecca to play 'Grifters' with him. He then went on to say how he wanted to be a grifter when he grows up. Fortunately, Rebecca pointed the camera down to where they were playing, so I was able to tell Rebecca what was going on: I'm not sure whether he learned the term from me, or possibly my brother-in-law X, who also humours Jude for seemingly endless hours playing cars, but it seems that Jude has developed an interest in drifting.

I'm not sure if that's much better than his becoming a grifter, but he sure as hell is not going to be taking my car anywhere unless I go with him. And I have got to be more careful in my creative play.