Les Bonnes Choses

A few days ago, I was complaining about the way that life begins with a Social Security number down here. You can't do anything without it, and just about everybody asks for it (though with the exception of your employer and banks, both of whom pay you money, your are not obliged to give it out to anybody). Thus, millions of Americans trust their key piece of identification in the hands of minimum wage employees every day. So there's a certain amount of schadenfreude that I experience when I read that the chairman of the fed was a victim of identity theft. It's not quite irony, because Ben Bernake doesn't administer the Social Security office, but it's kind of poetic nonetheless.

You know, there are methods, known to cryptographers, of devising sets of numbers, one publicly known and the other private, that might be useful in this sort of situation, Using something like RSA would require an overhaul of how SSNs are administered, but maybe the savings might be worth it.

It seems I can no longer go 24 hours without taking something apart. This evening, Rebecca was whipping up some icing with the electric hand mixer and found it was making rattling and grinding sounds, in addition to throwing off the occasional bit of plastic. Plastic in your icing is not Good Eats. Here is the offending noise-making part that was just rattling around loose inside the mixer:

So, I have decided to scrub my plans to go to Chicago for a postdoc and instead open up a Fix-It Shop franchise.

Before I gear up in my traffic-cone-orange motorcycle jacket, I have time for a couple quick thoughts.
First, I've been increasingly interested in (read: obsessed with) that traffic meter. For cities like Montreal, QC and Stevens Point, WI, I can guess who it might be a-knockin' at my blag's door. However, it's not foolproof. First, it doesn't always get the city correct. I believe I have had some visitors from Toronto and Ottawa that showed up as being from London (I speculate that it might be the fault of Rogers who might be doing some kind of caching trickery or something). Second, if you were to click the link to see the Top London Blogs, this morning you would see a blog called Walking Through Africa (which appropriately enough is a photographic chronicle of the blogger's travels through Africa) close to the top when this list is sorted by relevance. To be clear, by relevance, they mean it to indicate "...how interesting a blog is to people in a particular city ... if [there are] many blog entries about [the] local town or city, you'll probably find [the] blog close to the top of this list." And this is perhaps where the confusion stems from. London, Ontario is not to be found anywhere in Africa. It seems unlikely to me that much about London can be said when one is talking about Africa.

Perhaps all this talk of London, Ontario will allow me to vault to the top of the list.

Speaking of Africa, how about those Somali pirates? The BBC had an online poll this morning that asked How can pirates be stopped? Clearly, they are unaware that ninjas are the perfect foil to the pirate.

Rebecca knits. So do a number of friends who have come to form a tricoterie. I don't knit, myself, on account of being a dude and all*, but I glean vicarious enjoyment out of sporadic knitting nights (now long overdue). I also gain direct enjoyment out of teasing Rebecca about just how extreme knitters can be. Take, for example, the fact that celebrities exist within the knitting subculture -- and I'm no anthropologist, but I'm sure that they qualify as a legitimate subculture; they even have their own cant.

So there's plenty of fodder for my amusement. Or, at least, there was until this week, when the knitting scene became just a little more edgy. As the world literally collapsed around 98 year old Maria D'Antuono, living at or near the epicenter of the earthquake that struck Italy earlier this week, she whipped out a pair of crochet needles and worked on a smart easter shawl.

Okay, knitters. You win. You're hardcore.

The Village People, 1978. Now I can get random google traffic from people looking for The Village People. I feel like a spider in a web.

A request has been made for me to hurry up and get on with writing another blog entry. However, as I just got back from an intimate little conference in Niagara Falls, formerly the Honeymoon Capital of the World, but now the Schlock Capital of the World, I haven't had much time to reflect on the sorts of issues that allow me to deliver the kind of hard-hitting pieces to which you have become accustomed.

So I thought I'd take advantage of my lack of direction and make this a little exercise in creativity. I decided to pick my topic by selecting an article from Wikipedia using the random article link. So, without further ado, I present to you my thoughts on ...

Ingolfiella longipes

Hmm. I can't say much about it, aside what we can all read from the wikipedia page. It turns out I'm not really as good at this as I thought I might be. It took me a couple passes to read the name though. That species name looks alot like long-pipes. Really, this fun-loving crustacean has a name that could be a character from a Harry Potter novel or something. Ingelfella Longpipes, that quirky defense against the dark arts instructor, who's always fumbling about his magical pockets for his tin of tobacco.

I don't think I'll try this exercise again.

...for anyone left standing with a AAA credit rating.
I was just reading an article in Slate about how Sirius XM satellite radio is in a very bad place. I agree with the author: considering the ubiquity of portable music players like the iPod, satellite radio is pretty lame. The author talked about getting out of the satellite business and just market their programming over the internet. Okay, maybe. But what about those 7 satellites they have floating up there? If they're up to the task, snapping those things up in a fire sale to offer satellite internet access would be sweet.

Okay, it's a half-baked idea, but more than once have I left an idea in a half-baked state, and someone else comes along a few years later, throws it in the oven at 350° and makes a mint. It's irritating.

I just edited my first Wikipedia page. Okay, maybe edit is too strong of a word. I corrected the improper use of the word 'their' (when the author meant 'there' -- one of my pet peeves.). But it was really easy to do. I could see how someone with an anal-retentive streak like mine could get hooked on editing wikipedia pages. I don't know the stupid syntax - wiki uses its own markup, which gets converted into HTML so that people don't have to learn HTML. Of course, I know HTML, so you can probably see the perverseness in my learning wiki markup. And that's why I won't become a compulsive wiki editor, so you can cancel that intervention you were planning.

Speaking as a geek, and as someone who has made excessively elabourate cakes, I can appreciate how awesome this birthday must have been for the celebrant who got this cake:



However, if you check out the rest of the flikr images associated with the cake, you might wonder whether the birthday boy and his friends realize they have allowed themselves to become caricatures.

Last week, I had ordered the final bits (the motherboard, for those who care) for my new computer. This was to fill the void left when the company from whom I bought the other bits (tigerdirect.ca) failed to notify me that the motherboard I had ordered from them was never going to arrive. That evening, I placed an order for a similar motherboard from another Canadian online computer bits store, directcanada.com, who had good prices and promised fast shipping. At the end of the order process, an email arrived instructing me to click some sort of link so I could receive a phone call with a verification PIN. At this point, it was late, and Jude was asleep so I decided not to go through this phone call step and to just go to bed. The next morning, I checked my order status to find it was not yet complete, and I took this to mean that it was still waiting for me to initiate the phone call step. I figured by this point, it might be just faster to by the item locally, so and after I went with Jenny to transfer over her gym membership, I went out and bought the critically missing computer piece. I spent the next day installing software and just after I got everything 'just so', the doorbell rings. Purolator. With the motherboard that I thought was in stasis. What the heck am I going to do with this thing? The motivation behind this blog entry is that after I contacted directcanada.com and explained the situation, I received an apology for the confusion and an offer to pay for the return shipping and refund the purchase. I decided that because I didn't get the screwing over that I anticipated, and because their shipping was so ridiculously fast, that I would favourably mention them in a public forum. I have no need for it now, but the next time I need to buy some computer bits, directcanada.com will probably be the first place I check.

Why all the hyperlinks? Blogger is owned by google. And hyperlinks factor in to (or at least, they did once upon a time) search engine rankings. So if someone googles directcanada.com, this should show up near the top. At least, that's my theory. And perhaps I can be faulted for having theories about search engine rankings.

[begin part that probably only John, Ryan and Miranda will understand]
I finally did it: I took the plunge and ordered the bits and pieces for a replacement desktop computer from TigerDirect.ca. The computer on which I am presently typing has components that are 10 years old (I'll probably reuse the floppy drive, so I guess even the new computer will have some really old parts). I think I will go dual-boot with Linux and Windows XP.
[end part that probably only John, Ryan and Miranda will understand]

So after the computer bits arrive and I assemble my new super death machine®, I think I will be adding a new document scanner so I can continue the digitization of the bills and statements and all that other crap that various companies send me each month. Previous month's bills have been stored on Macho Me, but I read today about a free service called shoebox.com that will store pdf copies of your receipts, with no storage limit (I suppose that if one came to rely on it for a few years and they changed that policy, you could find yourself in a bit of a pickle). Anyways, that is what I learned today, and I just wanted to share it. You may now go about your normal business.