Les Bonnes Choses

This'll likely be my last post for the month of August, which will put me over the entry counts for the last two months. Not bad, considering that my family and I moved our household to a different country at the beginning of the month.

I was just about to jump over here from Facebook to write an entry when I saw the following ad text in the right hand ad column:

How Do I Look Mom
This is what Alex said about going to school. In Kenya, kids in high school must pay tuition, buy textbooks & uniform. Help a student.

Are my standards for ad copy too high? Or is 'spam' an official English dialect?

Now, on to the original point of my entry. This evening, Amy was hosting a going away party for one of the grad students. Unfortunately, Amy's music collection isn't very awesome. I feel Marc let her down in that respect. No worry though. I live ninety seconds away (no exaggeration) and have the most amazing collection of pop, alternative, electronica and baroque music on a portable hard drive. Amy had lent us a sauce pan when we arrived in town, so brought that with me when I returned as well. On my return, I noticed that there was a furniture store with a delivery entrance off of the alley way to Amy's apartment. As I am looking for bunk beds, I decided to check out the sale that they were having. Let's now imagine what the blog entry for the store owner might look like...

So the Sunday sale is winding down, and I'm just finishing tagging a sectional when some weirdo walks in from the alley carrying a pot -- like for cooking and stuff. Most normal people use the front door, so I immediately thought something was up. I asked him if I could help him, and he said he was looking for beds. And I thought, "Oh my God. Is this guy going to try and camp out here? He's got a pot. If he asks where the stoves are, I am calling the cops."

I was just reading this article on Wired about translating the electrical signals to the hand into the resultant handwriting. And then I noticed that writing with any of my fingers in the air would result in the same "handwriting" as pretending I was holding a pen. That might not seem especially strange until you consider that the instructions to your pinky finger to write your autograph would be quite different from those to your index finger guiding a pen to do the same thing. So it's like the instructions are reverse-engineered from the product. I don't know if anyone else who reads this is going to find this to be an interesting observation, though I can think of a few people who might. For everyone else, Jen posted a google maps link the other day to some busted grow-ops* in London, so maybe you might want to come back later and re-read this post.

*I'm not sure whether 2 plants found at the house on Emery St. qualifies as a grow-op. I mean, was the owner of the plants just getting his feet wet in this exciting new field? Or was he just really bad at growing plants?

What the hell is this?
I'm sorry, the anarchists are right. The whole system is a do-over. Put me and a team of engineers in charge. I'll even throw in healthcare for free. I'm serious about the engineers thing. I've talked about this at length with John. It might not be popular, but an engineered government would be damn efficient. Unsurprisingly, a google of "open source government" just shows how various public institutions are using Linux instead of Windows. I was kind of hoping that there was some project going on at Harvard or something, where a bunch of students were drafting the most awesome constitution ever.

I'm writing this post from the basement of the Northwestern Memorial hospital CAMRI center. All the scanning for the day is done, and we're just waiting for the data DVD for our last participant to be finalized. Today's lesson: DVDs do not need to be finalized.

So I'm anxious to get home so I can call Mom & Dad's. Everyone is over there for Grammy's 84th birthday. I haven't spoken to Grammy since about a month before I left for Chi-town, so I'd like to be able to wish her a happy birthday. Because of the time zone difference, I'm concerned about my ability to call before she gets whisked back home for bed.

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.

I've been having problems these last few days with Thunderbird + GMail. I started forwarding all my email to GMail back in January, mostly because I anticipated losing my UWO email account, but also because the inbox quota was much much larger than I could ever get at UWO. And at NU, they allow only a paltry 100 MB of email in your inbox -- I suspect someone in the IT department got one of those Far Side 365-day Desk calendars back in '98,left it at a particularly topical comic, and now everyone in the department thinks it's pre-Y2K. Then maybe one year at GenCon, the system administrator who owns the calendar will run off with some cosplay chick and the school will hire someone who is aware that a 100 MB quota is not appropriate.

Yes, it's fine if you're a POP3 n00b who only uses one computer, or adores webmail, but that's not how I roll.

Oh yeah, I got off topic. I started off bitching about Thunderbird + GMail, and ended up bitching about the ridiculously small inbox quota at NU. My bad. Back to the original complaint, which I am documenting so that it pops up on google when someone queries for "Thunderbird freezes on GMail Loading Message", which shows that other people are also having this problem.

Update: the rather impractical workaround I have been using involves deleting the two gmail accounts in Thunderbird, and then re-adding them. Thunderbird is able to read the inbox (for awhile, at least) when it attempts to download the mailboxes for the "first" time. This information might be diagnostically useful.

I sprinted home on my bike this afternoon to find a certain envelope from the Social Security office in my mailbox. I looked at it, tears welling in my eyes, and said "you complete me," before jumping in the shower so that I would be ready for Amy's arrival with the Irish postdoc candidate we interviewed this afternoon. We took her to a quiet little restaurant nearby on the lab's dime, so I had the filet mignon, substituting the asparagus (eew) for broccoli. When it comes time to put in our $.02, I'll give her a thumbs up. I hope she works out, because that would mean that all four of the postdoctoral positions in the lab will be filled with foreigners, which amuses me.

My next task for the day will be to order a bunk bed, hoping the website is somewhat more functional than it was last night. And I expect to fall asleep after talking to Rebecca via Skype. Only 6 more days until she and the little smus return. I understand le petit monsieur is much different from when last I saw him, so I am very anxious to meet him again.