Les Bonnes Choses

I am extremely educated. I've got a PhD, a Masters and not one but two undergrad degrees, one of which is in Computer Science. In my role as a postdoc, one of the items in my portfolio of responsibilities is to deal with "computer related issues". The lab in which I work has amassed several hundred lines of computer scripts which I have written, mostly to relieve everyone of many of the most tedious tasks, but some of them do some pretty fancy stuff. So I find it somewhat unsettling that there are some rather common pieces of technology that I just don't get -- like cell phones. I can use a cell phone to dial a 10-digit number and talk to the person at the other end. But in the extremely unlikely event that I ever became interested in [countryname] Idol, I have no idea how to text 'VOTE' to 436501.



And then there's the iPhone, or more generically, the smartphone. Rebecca hinted it might be neat for us each to have an iPhone. And my dad's wisdom came to me: "Lie down until the feeling passes," I said. I promised I'd look into it. I mean, I know several people who have them, and they're all successful. I want to be successful. Is there an app for that? So I went on to the Rogers website to look at their plans (in Ontario, Telus and Rogers carry iPhones. Bell does not. I really, really wish there were more options because I think both Rogers and Bell might be technically guilty of crimes against humanity). To me, the phone plan descriptions were like a window into a foreign world. Anyways, this all may be moot, because everyone seems to be sold out of the damn things anyways.

Update: I googled "why the hell would I want a smartphone" this morning, and found this link, which I think describes my situation.

I came across this link on the Ceeb this afternoon about a Canadian company that is making a "Cannabis electric car". Scrolling down the page, I found great humour in the heading, Colleges to help build cars. It seems like the perfect ecosystem: a bunch of stoners fumbling their way through a liberal arts college create a demand for weed. The non-narcotic parts of the plant get used to make the vehicles that they stoners can drive to score some more weed.

Bonus CBC.ca reference: It must be a perfect storm of the low frequency of the word topples plus the context of Amsterdam, den of debauchery, but I keep reading Anne Frank tree topples in Amsterdam as a story about Anne Frank going topless. I'm no pervert, so I hesitated before I read the actual story. It would be kind of neat to get one of those tree clones, though.

Judging by the feedback I received on my blog's facebook alter ego, many of you already knew that newspaper was an effective window cleaner. I suppose that shouldn't be surprising, since so many who left comments are bordering on old age, and no doubt remember back in the day, when nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. "Gimme five bees for a quarter," you'd say. Now where was I...?

Oh yeah, so just to make a stark juxtaposition with yesterday's old-timey tip, I'm going to tell you a little something about the browser you're using to read this blog. Now, because of my background as a cyborg, I've been parachuted into many a situation where a computer needs a good fixin'. Sometimes the hardware is fried. Other times, the culprit is the dancing hamster screensaver that seemed like a good idea at the time. In most cases, however, if the computer is starting up, one thing I'm likely to do is use the browser to do something. They've gotten to be really helpful at suggesting where you might want to go, often based on your browser history. And boy-howdy, is it ever awkward when I start to type "www." only to have the browser suggest "midgetsinlatex.com/memberlogin.asp".

So, okay, that's one socially related reason to rethink whether you want your browser keeping track of your history. But I recently came across a privacy-related reason. I've always been wary of the browser history, not because I'm afraid of someone finding out I'm big into the cosplay scene (go ahead, click the link. It's safe for work, and just weird), but rather, because I'm never 100% sure that some bank-related information won't be useful in perpetrating some kind of fraud. It turns out that my hunch was right, but for a different reason. A person can belong to lots very large groups, but very few individuals will belong to a large set of groups. For example, how many males are there out there? Billions. That's a big group. How many of them are in North America? Still quite a few, but less than a billion. And of those, how many of them are Aerosmith fans? Tens of thousands? How many of those guys also watch Glee? Run marathons?

It turns out that social websites like Facebook make it quite easy to figure out who you are, especially if you visit Facebook fan sites, because your browser happily reveals to anyone whether your browser history contains any given entry. So if you've visited Farmville, checked out the Twilight fan page and then commented on Lilo's parole, your browser might be giving you away. Aside from compromising your privacy, I don't know whether being able to personally identify you is particularly useful, but if the idea of it bothers you, you should look into clearing your browser history, and making sure it doesn't record it.

And that, my friends, is my PSA for the day. Speaking of PSA... (NSFW language)

I was unemployed for pretty much my entire high school career -- with only a brief under-the-table stint as a convenience store clerk at a very inconvenient location during the summer prior to my sixteenth birthday as the exception. Of course, I was envious of my friends who were able to gain employment (I think I was the only unemployed one of the lot of us, though we speculated that one of my friends was, in fact, enslaved). Fortunately, our hobbies were relatively inexpensive, with our largest expenditure being a $.78 a week Kool-Aid habit (had we had access to the internet, it could have been even less expensive).

It wasn't until just prior to frosh week that I picked up my first job at the now obliterated Capitol Theatre. I had an "in".



I suppose there might be sexier ways to pay for one's undergrad -- not literally 'sexier' as in becoming a stripper, though I'm sure you'll have more than covered tuition by the time you write your first midterm -- and I didn't fill out too many application forms before I realized that that option wasn't available to me at the time. Still, all-you-can-watch movies beats out many jobs that were open to me. The only downside was the interminable reconciliation of the snack bar inventory at the end of each night, and the cleaning of the popcorn popper. What kind of challenge did cleaning the popcorn popper pose? Well, first off, try typing "popcorn popper pose" three times quickly without accidentally spelling the word pooper (I wonder what kind of hits the word pooper is going to pull in from google). Second, these aren't air poppers: they use genuine vegetable oil (they switched from palm kernel oil to butter-flavoured canola early into my tenure, and man, would I love to get my hands on some of that stuff - it smelled like butterscotch). Moreover, the top half of these machines are glass -- glass that had to be cleaned to a streak free shine after getting a thorough coating of oil and salt all night long.

What brought this to mind this evening was that I was cleaning our living room window, covered in Crayola Window Writer marker. Rebecca had cleaned it once, but the window was left with a hazy film. Clearly, Rebecca had never had the responsibilities of a movie theatre usher. The trick? Newspaper. A first pass with soapy water got most of the oil off, but a second pass with newspaper and water (we used soda water) left the glass clean and streak free. My guess is that something in the newspaper ink makes a really good cleaner. Whatever the case, as I stood at the spotless window with a Lowe's circular in hand, I felt compelled to share my fond memories of my first job, and one of the best cleaning tips you will hear nowhere else.

I'm going to group together two optimism-related posts here. The first one concerns a rather optimistic prediction of "reverse engineering the brain" in 20 years. That's one way to get your name into general consumption mainstream media: get yourself quoted making completely outlandish predictions. Willingly or not, I'm involved in this reverse-engineering program, and based on my behind-the-scenes experience, I'll happily promise to eat my hat if we come anywhere close to what this guy is predicting while I'm still working.

Ah, that's rich. Still working -- as if to imply I have a job. I guess I'm a bit of an optimist too. I'm working on training it into the next generation using a reward system. At the beginning of the summer, Jude was enrolled in a program called Book Buddies at his preschool, two weeks after the last day of the regular school year. I suspect there's a reason the year ended when it did, because it was like September all over again, and Jude was never happy to start his day there. For the first few days, he grumbled when we picked him up, but one day, I asked him whether he had a good enough day to merit a sticker. Since then, I've been rewarding him not for being good, but instead for having a good day (being generally pleasant and obedient is a necessary condition for having a good day). I've got a good feeling it's going to work.

If you're here, and can make sense of what I'm writing, then you've gone through the ordeal of learning to read. If you have kids or work with kids, then you've had a chance to revisit the process, as I have recently. Commonly found in the arsenal of reading primers are picture books with 26 pages of apples, bats, and cats, etc. My recent re-acquaintance with these books has stirred up a fire in my belly.

I imagine that many children have eaten apples, touched a baseball bat, and petted a cat by the time they enter kindergarten. But I suspect that the number of 4 year old radiologists in the world is rather small. Zero, I daresay. So when you hit page 24 of your picture book only to read the word "X-ray", I think it would be quite understandable if the word failed to resonate with the child. I mean, it's a crap example anyways. Why not just replace the rest of the words with things like F-bomb and Big-O and make all of the examples into useless self-references.



And what are the alternatives? Xylophone, it seems -- no doubt placed there by the percussionist lobby, because the only reason anyone has ever heard of that instrument is from those damn books. And until Black-Eyed Peas replaces Fergie with a xylophone virtuoso like Ian Finkel, that's unlikely to change.

As a letter, it's not like it does anything other letters can't do. In words like xylophone it's pronounced like a Z, and in words like exit, it could just as easily be replaced with ks. Really, the only thing X has going for it is its shape, which is kind of cool and mysterious -- taboo, even. The letter most similar in shape, the 'K', doesn't have quite the same mojo, and in any case, I don't think the porn industry would have done nearly as well with triple-K (i.e., KKK) movies. So I'm going to look to the growing Tea Party movement to see if I can get my idea out there and in the hearts and minds of voters intent on trimming Big Government and Big Alphabet, and hopefully getting the economy turned around.

I was making a "setup" with Mr. Jude today (he often now refers to himself in the third person as "Mr. Jude", which I think is absolutely fantastic), when I noticed something on the props we were using:



Does that make me a bad parent because we give our kids choking hazards with which to play? Well, no, actually. Here's the object in question, with a standard alphabet block for reference (and the floor tiles are 1-foot squares):



Choking hazard for whom? I understand that manufacturers hire lawyers to make sure their asses are covered, but I don't think this helps. In fact, in a world where every cup of hot coffee is marked with a caution that its contents may be hot, and sleeping pills are labeled to indicate that they may cause drowsiness, we are stuck with warnings that are either obvious* or else irrelevant. Either way, can people be blamed for not bothering to read them anymore? One day, someone is going to launch a lawsuit against manufacturers for causing them to disregard warnings, resulting in injury. I think I'd be rooting for him.

*Naturally, some warnings are not obvious to some people. But that's what the Darwin awards are for.

Bonus: The cone is marked unsuitable for children under 3, and for ages 4 and up, making it unclear how it relates to a 3 year old.

Okay, so here is what life is like inside the mind of someone who overthinks things. I've been to a number of potlucks. I've hosted a number of potlucks. One thing remains constant: an overabundance of food. I don't know how many times I've implored people to take home some leftovers because it pains me to throw away so much food at the end of the night when there are starving people in Africa. Or indeed, pretty much everywhere. And if you're like me you've wondered from time to time just how much food is being tossed out. And if you're like me today, on the way to buy 3 dozen cookies to bring to a potluck (here's where I was), you figure out a good approximation.

Here's the thing: when someone goes to a potluck, knowing that there will be, say, 10 people there, they buy enough food to feed all 10 people. Okay, it works a little differently when people are invited as couples, or families, but the general gist is the same. Alright, so now each of the 10 people arrive at the party with 10 portions of KFC, lasagne, caesar salad or pie. That's 100 portions of food. Invite 12 people, and now there's 144 portions of food. Even allowing that each of those portions accounts for only, say, 25% of a meal (main dish, side 1, side 2, dessert), at the end of the day, the amount of food that gets wasted is exponential. When resources get wasted at an exponential rate, that's kind of a big deal.

So what's the take home (aside from leftovers)? Well, if you're a math teacher, this would be a really good 2-point question, maybe 5 points if you also ask for an appropriate number of cookies to bring to minimize waste. If you'll be attending a potluck in the near future and are either cost or waste conscious, you might rethink whether you really need to buy the family bucket of chicken. And finally, if you were thinking of hosting a potluck, you might want to cross me off your invite list, because, man, what a buzzkill.