Les Bonnes Choses

The following email subject line appeared in my inbox today:

[Spam?] From:Pastor Maurice Godwin (My Request please)

Of course, you know who else had a "small request"?

If you have never heard of Godwin's Law, you won't get it. But after you follow the link and waste a few minutes of your day, you will have access to 8% more internet humour.

This afternoon, I borrowed the HP Scanjet 8290 document scanner that has been sitting unused in our lab for a very long time. I have a vague recollection of Ken talking about getting a scanner to convert his collection of photocopied articles from back before the series of tubes known as teh intarwebs into PDF documents. I don't know how far into that project the RA of the day (probably Sam) got, but in any case, the thing has been collecting dust for several years. It's now getting a workout as I try to clean up the home office by digitizing the paper that collects and multiplies. The HP website was brutal to navigate, not because it was hard to find what I was looking for, but instead because their server was mostly unresponsive and kept timing out. I just had to mention that so that it becomes a matter of public record that the Hewelett Packard website runs quite poorly, considering that they sell computer hardware.

And now, I shall say something inflammatory because there have been few comments of late, and writing blog entries is sort of like writing an open email - every now and again, it's nice to get a reply just to confirm the message didn't get lost. This inflammatory remark is aimed at Corinne, who I know likes Stéphane Dion. I maintain that he is not doing very well leading the Liberals. I would have preferred Bob Rae at the helm. Oh, and also Jim Flaherty, what's up with that guy? He loses his spot as Ontario finance minister when the Ontario Conservatives get booted, but as federal finance minister, he starts sticking his nose into Ontario's budget? Does that remind anyone else of the guy from Office Space who got fired but won't take the hint and keeps coming into work? That is all.

I was delighted to learn today that mine was one of "many excellent applications" for a certain academic position at a fine institution that rhymes with mooniversity of moronto. I would take some comfort in knowing that "the committee's review was not an easy one" ... except that, as I wasn't called for an interview, presumably the decision was fairly straightforward in my case. I had already written off the possibility of getting that job a couple months ago, when I learned that they had begun the job talks for the position, so what I am expressing here isn't bitterness at not getting the job (cognitive dissonance had helped me deal with that back in January). Rather, I guess I am just expressing some minor annoyance that I suppose everyone must get when they receive a form letter that is so generic that it doesn't even seem to apply.

P.S., their letterhead is the ugliest thing I have ever seen on a document that did not involve a photocopier and someone's ass.

P.P.S., The dissonance effect to which I refer is the psychological phenomenon, and not the kickass band from the early 2000's

Last week, a couple of neighbourhood girls came to the door sometime in the early evening. When I opened the door, they asked if I would donate "to charity", and presented me with a nondescript clear plastic container containing a few coins. I asked the girl who had presented the container what the charity was.

"Um...," she said, as her face betrayed a look of horror. She exchanged glances with the other girl, who spoke up after a moment.

"For kids ... who have no clothes or any food to eat or a place to live," she said. The girl carrying the change then said something else to further embellish the charity description. I forget what, exactly, because at the time, I was thinking to myself that this was the ballsiest act I had ever seen perpetrated by a child under the age of 12. Now, I should note that, even though I am willing to bet my one-and-only liver (I estimate the black market value to be $50,000, based on the $20,000 one can get for a kidney) that they were not canvassing under the auspices of any particular charity, I cannot completely rule out the possibility that they were perhaps inspired by something that some random kid did, and were going to take that money straight to school the next day, and get some guidance from their teacher. However, even if they had figured out a rather novel, if not morally reprehensible means of making a bit of spending money, I felt that the dollar I gave them from my pocket was worth the story.

And while I am on the topic of hucksters and thinking outside the box, an idea came to me this afternoon. I received a call from MNBA, telling me about their platinum Mastercard, and how they are the first credit card to be endorsed by the UWO Alumni Association. I think the telemarketer was a bit confused when I congratulated her on that accomplishment. Anyways, after I declined the offer three times, I hung up. Then part of my brain must have gotten to work on a solution to the telemarketing problem. Here's what it came up with: How would you like to get your home phone service from a phone company that automatically redirects all incoming calls from telemarketers representing some company to the home phone numbers of the members of the boards of directors for that company. That would be sweet.

The other night, I was flipping through a book called The Dangerous Book for Boys that Rebecca had picked up, probably at Costco, probably before Jude arrived. It's full of all sorts of things that boys should know, such as how to tie various knots, write codes, and make water bombs. We also own the companion book, The Daring Book for Girls (and before you ask, no, that is not to be taken as an indication that Jude is going to be a big brother in the next year). I flipped through the pages of that book just now, and saw there was a section on washing cars. I noted a few omissions in that particular section; for example, there was neither specific mention of how to select the proper car-wash bikini, nor mention of at what point one is to turn the hose on her girlfriend, thereby starting a giggle-filled water-fight.

Not to be confused with pointing an laughing, which is something in which my pretty sister Carolyn specialises, I am writing about photography. I have participated in a couple of scavenger hunts -- one for Nick and Alex, and one for Kevin -- that involved photography in a public place. I stumbled across a website (after stumbling across another website) that addresses the confusion and often incorrect set of beliefs that many people have concerning photography in public places. I think the laws are well summed up with the rule of thumb that, if you are in a public place (or private property with public access) then you are allowed to snap away unless instructed otherwise (e.g., by a sign, or by the property owner). It is also worth nothing that tasteful nudes are generally illegal in these places, even without explicit signage.

(why is the word 'tasteful' always applied to describe nudes?)

Today I heard back in the negative from the fine people at NSERC. I was quite bummed by the disappointing news because I thought that it was my most likely option for once I finish up my PhD. Fortunately, I was looking after Jude by myself this evening, while Rebecca was out at choir, and playing with the little guy helped take my mind off things. Plus, it was a good reminder of what I would potentially be missing if I had to take a postdoc elsewhere and Rebecca stayed in London. That would have sucked. However, barring a surprise interview request from Carleton (I haven't heard from them for a couple of months now, so either the job doesn't exist, or else they're in the middle of filling it) or from Waterloo, I am going to have to figure out how to get out of my predicament, because I'm quickly running out of track.

On Friday, I made tempura battered cod, sweet potato fries and edamame for dinner. Unfortunately, the house still smells like cooking oil. It's irritating. If anyone has any suggestions that do not involve airing out the house when it is barely above freezing, I'd like to hear them.

Speaking of things sticking, the kids songs on the latest CD that Rebecca has bought Jude for the car are just a little too good at getting caught in my head. Someone should invent some kind of auditory-loop wash. Not a total brain-washing, just a gentle scrubbing of those parts of your brain that keep cycling the same song over and over and over...

You may have noticed that I have recently been making liberal use of images in my posts. I think it makes them easier to consume. Unfortunately, I don't have a suitable graphic prepared at the moment.

It was the ides of March today. Did everyone get out today and stab someone to celebrate? Unfortunately, I didn't get out until this evening, to celebrate Jen Boman's defense against the dark arts (and by dark arts, I mean the UWO senate). All afternoon long, I was cleaning stuff: the floor, the refrigerator (which has now been leveled so that I can make proper ice cubes -- or ice³ as I may call it). Added to that was the task of making linner (dunch?) -- whatever it was, it was an afternoon meal that we didn't have until after 4. So by the time we left the house, all the good ides of March stabbing fun was done.



I also checked out my preliminary data for one of my experiments that I have been running at school. Like everything else I have been doing in grad school, my experimental task hasn't been done before: feature verification (which has been done before) involves indicating whether some feature (e.g., wings) is a property of some concept (e.g. ROBIN). My experiment is a dual feature verification task, where you have to indicate whether both listed features belong to the concept. Unfortunately, it's not working out at all -- if anything, the results are backwards of what I would predict. All is not lost, however, as I figured out something that really ought to be added to the experiment. Better late than never, I suppose. So I guess that means I'll have to run yet another experiment.

I know the title of this post could be misconstrued, but anyone who knows me will quickly put the alternative interpretation out of their minds, and know that I am making a reference to the men's fragrance, produced by Calvin Klein. Anyways, on to my point. I get fixated on some visual themes from time to time. Since OAC summer school biology, I have doodled hundreds of reflective spheres. A few years ago, it was the Celtic trinity knot. More recently, I have been contemplating doing up a proper website for myself, which naturally got me more sensitive to the look and feel of the websites that all the cool kids are doing these days. Things have come a long way since I last built websites using nested html tables. For the last two weeks, or so, I have been obsessed with drawing those web 2.0 glassy buttons. If you don't know what I'm talking about, think about the interface to any Apple product, and more recently, to the prettified Windows Vista. Many websites are using this look too. Notice how everything looks all nice and shiny, like the interface is supposed to be made of glass, or shiny plastic (why, just today, I saw a website that seemed to be borrowing heavily from the look of carbon fiber). Photoshop CS had a plugin for glass buttons, but it was crap. I should know, because I tried to make a glassy button for the feature norms website (you may follow the link if you wish, and fill out whatever knowledge you may have about some random objects -- use 00+your phone number as your 9-digit log in ID if you do). I recently found a tutorial for duplicating this effect in Photoshop, and more interestingly, in Illustrator, which is really cool because Illustrator can make fully scalable vector images. You probably aren't as thrilled about that as I am. Trust me, it's cool. Anyways, the extent of my obsession is such that this evening, I downloaded a vector drawing program called Inkscape just so I could drop some glossy circles. My withdrawal symptoms have abated, and my graphic can be found here.


Update for tagging purposes: If you go to the feature norm website, the voice you hear reading the instructions belongs to Amy. She has the best voice for reading instructions of anyone I know. Also for tagging purposes, I took that OAC biology class with Daan DeKerpel. We were "cheating bandits".

It's 10:45 on a Friday night. Jude is asleep (for now), and Rebecca and I are goofing around on the computer. Rebecca had been putting together an album of Jude's first year, but she was having a bit of a problem finding photos. Not for lack of photos, mind you. The first year she got a digital camera, her photos easily fit on a CD-ROM. Then she got a second digital camera, and filled that CD-ROM. After her first year with her third camera, she filled a DVD. And the photos she took in 2007 would fill a dual-layer DVD (if only Nero was working properly on her computer). So she felt she needed some way to keep her photos in order. She had downloaded Picassa, in the vain attempt to put up a photo album to be used with a knitting project website called ravelry.com, but ravelry unfortunately only deals with flikr albums at this time. Picassa had been uselessly installed on her computer these last few months, but I was pretty sure that it had some kind of photo tagging capability, which I verified last night. And so now, Rebecca is going back through thousands of photos, meticulously tagging each of them. And unless I am mistaken, the software took a crack at image identification, because a test search for Carrie came up with some photos from our wedding that I am sure I had not tagged last night. If it works, that's really cool. And since we have about 10 photos of Jude for each day he has been alive, the software should have a good idea what he looks like.

As for my computer project tonight, I am providing tech support for Rebecca's project, and trying to find a copy of the 1991 Jesus Jones album. I don't consider it piracy, since I actually own a scratched copy of the CD. Surprisingly, Mr. Jones is not as popular as he was in '91.


Update: Jesus Jones still has 4 fans from which I was able to download the album

I have fark.com as my homepage for most of my browsers. It's kind of like a news aggregator, except the headlines are written by members of the web counterculture, and are usually pretty amusing. I found this one today particularly amusing:

Oregon conducts lottery where prize is health insurance. If it works out, will be expanded to game show will pit poor contestants against one another to compete for other necessities.

Um, what else do I have to report? Well, I have been telling anyone who will listen that my poster, which will detail the experiments I have been doing for my dissertation got accepted at a conference in Italy at the end of April. It's very exciting, because I have never been to Italy. There will be pasta. Flying spaghetti monster strikes again!

This morning, as soon as I logged into my Thinkpad laptop, I was greeted with the following dialog box:
Now that is a fine question. Perhaps my computer was waxing philosophical, and wondering what it all means.

We have had Pokey sleeping in his big-boy bed for awhile now. I have no concept of time anymore, so it seems like it's been at least a month, but it has certainly been at least a few weeks. Unfortunately, I am still night-time daddy -- when he wakes up in the middle of the night, usually around 1am, and I go in to comfort him, he wants nothing to do with me. Instead, he shakes his head when he sees me enter the room, and then, after blearily rubbing his eyes, he dismounts the bed, and stumbles into the hallway to find mommy.
During the days, we're good buddies though. He stayed over at my parents last night so that Rebecca and I could play Settlers of Catan with Jack and Katie (incidentally, I have begun my quest for the DIY custom Catan game). So when I saw him this evening, he was happy to see me. We will also be playing in the puddles this spring: