Les Bonnes Choses

One thing I have noticed since moving to the US over a month ago is that the telemarketers are much more of a nuisance. When I first mentioned this to someone, they replied, "well, don't they have ten times the population? Of course you're getting more phone calls!" True, with ten times the population of Canada, it stands to reason that there might be ten times the number of businesses calling people. But they also have ten times as many phones to call. No, proportionally, there seems to be a higher volume of telemarketing traffic, at least by my estimation. In Canada, they recently instated a Do Not Call list. Problem with that was that many people experienced an increase in telemarketer calls after registering their numbers: In effect the list was a registry of valid phone numbers that could be called for the next 30 days.

The DNC list first showed up here in the US, however, and I figured that I am unlikely to receive any more telemarketers calling than I already am. So this evening, I registered my phone number. After 30 days, I'm just going to start making crap up on the phone.

Many years ago, I found myself considering my career options. Daan's dad was a clinical psychologist, which appealed to me at the time. However, I have also always had an interest in the life sciences, so I also considered psychiatry, which is kinda similar, except it requires an MD. One important consideration is that I have never been a particularly good sleeper -- being unable to cat-nap when being on call for thirty six straight hours would probably lead me into more than one malpractice suit, and permanent eye-bags. Thus, when I entered the first year of my undergrad at King's College, my course selection sent me down the road to my PhD in psychology (though I decided along the way that being a clinician was not for me and instead found myself studying cognition and now cognitive neuroscience, which is kinda medical, in a poser kind of way).

I am presently watching How It's Made, a Canadian-produced program that runs on Discovery back in Ontario, and on the Science Channel here in Illinois. As the program's title may imply, it shows how various objects are made; tonight, for example, we had coloured pencils, fancy ball-point pens and iron chandeliers. Just moments ago, however, the icky feeling I got when they were showing how various blood products were made out of whole blood drawn from volunteers reaffirmed yet another reason that I was correct not to pursue med school.

In fact, the whole purpose of this blog entry was to serve as a distraction so that the television program didn't cause me to pass out.

A few days ago, I mused about what I might want for my birthday. Don't get me wrong, if one of you crazy people delivered a yacht or a jet pack to my door, I would most certainly be delighted. And wonder whether you're involved with the Miami drug trade where yachts are plentiful, or come from the future where jet packs are plentiful. However, f'reals, I have been trying to figure out whether I want the pleasure of owning a cell phone again. In London, I seldom used my phone, and so never came anywhere close to using up the 200 minutes per month that Rogers charged me for (after a month of particularly gratuitous usage, I managed to use 50 minutes).

Then my jerk* of a brother-in-law goes and brings his iPhone with him on our car ride from London to Chicago. He's all texting Heather hither and yon, finding our position on a map because my GPS had been stolen, and looking up CITAG. If you're shipwrecked on an island, you want a guy who knows how to catch fish and build a fire using only a pair of shoelaces and a swatch of canvas. If you're lost in the arctic, you still want the firebuilding, but are going to need some rabbit-trapping skills. For pretty much any other situation, you want an iPhone.

Aside: if Apple uses that line, or any derivative thereof, I will sue them into the stone age -- as in, before 3G wireless carriers existed.

Anyways, after JPM stepped in with some words of wisdom, I realized that, if I don't mind only being able to phone from WiFi hotspots, Skype on an iPod Touch at $.021/min is pretty inexpensive; probably even less than the pay-as-you-go plans I've seen. The downside: I just recently bought myself a very satisfactory mp3 player (which would become obsolete), and iPods are the sorts of things that get stolen or get you mugged.

*Note that I don't actually think that my brother in law is a jerk. I rather like him, and have even been accused of having a man-crush on him -- I don't, but will admit that he is somewhat dreamy in a rugged, well-educated kind of way.

Monsieur Jude reached the 'why?' stage earlier this year and hasn't looked back. Unfornately, he also has a pretty good grasp of the while(TRUE){} programming structure, so once he starts asking why [some X], you can rest assured that he'll ask why [your explanation for X] until you distract him with something shiny (ideally, a new 1:55 scale die cast member of the Pixar Cars cast, or even one of those made up cars that I'm sure never appeared in the movie and yet appear on store shelves).

This evening, his stomach squeaked at bedtime.
"What sound was that?"
"That was your belly"
"Why?"
"Because your belly squeaks sometimes."
"Why?"
"... Because it has doors in it."
"Why?"
"Because sometimes doors squeak. Your belly has doors in it to keep all the food from going in there at the same time."
"Why?"
"Because it would get too crowded in there if all the food went in at the same time."
"Oh."

He has a memory like a trap, so he's going to remember that his belly has doors in it right up until he takes high school biology. Then he can learn the word sphincter and have a grand old time, just like we did.

I've tried unsuccessfully a couple of times to submit links to Fark.com. If you're not familiar with the website, it's basically a news aggregator where the headlines are written by a bunch of smartarses. Sometimes you need to click on the story to get the joke; other times the headlines are a self-explanatory play on words or meme. Unfortunately, I'm just one of a horde of web savvy smartarses out there, so getting a headline submission approved is actually pretty difficult.

After today's failure, I decided, screw it. I've got my own forum for smartarsery. So I present my rejected submission for today:

The hunter becomes the hunted

Update: the revisionist bastards at CBC have revised their story. As originally posted, the pair was ghost hunting.

Fine, Carrie.

My birthday is coming up pretty soon, and if you're like most people, you haven't yet bought me a gift. I must admit that I am partly to blame for this, as I have not made generally public a list of suitable gifts. I also must admit that I am becoming just like every other hard to shop for dad out there. However, I can't see how it can be any other way: you're born into this world all bare-ass with nothing. From there on, you're a collecting machine so that there comes a time when you really don't need anything else. Sure, there's lots of stuff out there that I don't have but might like, though not enough that I've already gone out and gotten it for my own damn self. Other things can't be put on a birthday wish list with a straight face, like one of those 35 foot yachts that I've been seeing out in the harbour on Lake Michigan as we follow Lake Shore into downtown Chicago. Yes, one of those things would be a fantastic gift (though upkeep on one of those things would be a bitch), but I don't run in the kind of circles where yachts might be a gift-giving idea. Perhaps if someone could coordinate all of my readers; maybe each could chip in a couple of bucks?

You know, I remember being in the kitchen of my grandparents' house on Oxford St. at Christmas time, 1979. My mom or dad (can't remember which) asked what I wanted for Christmas. My answer: a jet pack. I must have picked the term up on the schoolyard, where the kids played Star Wars every recess. I also remember trying to draw a jet pack to show my parents what the hell I was talking about. I couldn't have been that committed to the idea because, although I am quite sure I did not get a jet pack, neither do I remember being disappointed that Christmas. Maybe I just didn't draw it very well.

So, yeah, a yacht or a jet pack. Take your pick.

They deliver mail on Saturdays here in the US. Isn't that weird? I also get it delivered right to my door, which is kind of nice. Now that my cheques have arrived though, I don't really have much else to look forward to in my mailbox.

My inbox, however, is another thing altogether. I had been having problems retrieving my GMail inbox contents from two accounts in Thunderbird. I use Thunderbird because I hate using webmail interfaces. Not sure why my sensibilities demand a standalone application for reading my email, but that seems to be how I roll. For the last few weeks, however, there's been a problem with the system, which I have documented in earlier blog posts, and also been trying to debug in an online forum (I am user Chris M). If you were to follow that last link and scroll down to the end, you would find that the culprit seems to have been the Lightning plug-in trying to sync with GCal. This is a recent development, because I had been using GCal with Lightning for some while, however I recently switched from using the Provider add-on to using the native CalDAV calendar syncronization.

Coincidence?
Maybe.
Or maybe it was ...
Murder most foul!