It’s been a while

I’ve noted before that my high-school friend Bill Irwin found these pages some while go, and we’ve reconnected. Such are the benefits of social networks, including blogs, as well as, yes, Twitter and Facebook, if you can accept those. I’ve also noted that after five years of mostly daily blogging, I decided to back off starting in February, cutting back to every two or three days instead.

About a week and a half ago, Bill posted a comment to my most recent entry here. The entry is perhaps fittingly titled Don’t make promises... [you can’t keep]; fitting because my promise of two or three blog entries a week has not been kept — that most recent post is dated 7 September, and today is 25 October.

I didn’t publish Bill’s comment, because I wanted to promote it to a top-level entry. And note that it took me a week and a half to get to that. Here’s what he said:

Alright, Leiba, I’ve had enough. You inspired me to start out on my own blog and now you’ve stopped your own. Dammit, what gives? Gimme some feedback, dude, I don’t won’t to lose contact with you after all these many years...

Mea culpa; mea maxima culpa. First, I’ll say that anyone I’ve (re-)connected with through these pages will not be lost: you know how to contact me, I know how to contact you, and we can stay in touch.

That said, I do want to keep writing here, and I do intend to. It’s clear that once I gave up the discipline of daily, I lost the push to do it altogether; it’s been too easy to turn an every so often commitment into no commitment at all. I might have to re-think how I get motivated to post here. Because I do have a number of things set aside to say, but I haven’t made the time to say them.

And I won’t, probably, for the next few weeks either. I’ll try to get something out here and there, but I’m in the middle of a batch of (mostly business) travel. I was at the Internet Identity Workshop last week; I’m in Paris for the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group this week. And the travels continue until I get back from the IETF meeting in Taipei on 18 November.

For now, I’ll post, below a panorama of the view from my hotel room, looking north from Montparnasse (click to enlarge). The major buildings are, left to right, Tour Montparnasse (Montparnasse Tower, the black office tower on the far left), Hôtel National des Invalides (the gold-dome, a military museum and hospital/residence for disabled veterans), Observatoire de Paris (the white dome), Basilique du Sacré Cœur (Sacred Heart Basilica, on the hill in the far rear), Abbaye du Val de Grâce, and Hôtel du Panthéon (the domes in the foreground).

A Trick of the Gmail?

When you’re looking at Gmail’s conversation list, it likes to show you just the first names of some of the people involved in the conversation — usually the first and last interlocutors, but sometimes others, depending upon repetitions and whatnot. It can be a bit odd sometimes. When I’m having a conversation that involves someone else called Barry, it can look like I’m talking to myself. And it’s often the case that there’s one particular Murray or Dave or Jim with whom I usually talk, but a message from a different person of the same name will throw me off.

But sometimes, the juxtapositions are just a bit amusing:

I guess it’s just that I’ve been a Genesis fan since way back.

Personal watermelon

Forty seven seconds to walk

You know how some intersections in some cities have digital count-downs, telling you how many seconds you have to cross before the walk signal changes to don’t walk? How do they come up with the times?

I just waited at a corner, and when the walk signal came on, the timer started at 47. Who decided that it should be 47 seconds, and not, say, 45, or 50? And why? Is there really any sense in which 47 seconds is enough, but 45 isn’t, and 50 is too long? Why should two or three seconds one way or another matter?

One wonders.

The second boy is half price

Quite the deal they have going this weekend at a store in the local shopping mall:

Winter cleaning

I’m doing some clearing up around the house, and last night I decided it was time to get rid of a bunch of old reel-to-reel tapes with music recorded on them. My reel-to-reel tape deck hasn’t worked in years (I brought that to the electronics recycling center over the weekend), and, what with changes in technology, I hadn’t been missing it, and would be unlikely to listen to the tapes again anyway.

With the assumption that no one else will want them either (or, rather, that it would be too much trouble to try to find them a home), I took out some packing tape and bound them together in stacks of ten. It turns out that I have 138 of them. They’re recorded at 3¾ inches per second (not the audiophile method, but I wanted more music on each tape), making it three hours per side, 6 hours per tape. Each was recorded by hand from LPs (Remember them?), and, so, 138 tapes times 6 hours each comes to well over 800 hours spent making them.

They were packed for the trash inside of fifteen minutes.

Even though I haven’t listened to them in more than 20 years, even though I would never be listening to them again, even though it felt good to see the space they took up become empty, I still felt a little sad to think about those many hours I spent on them, and to realize that at least half were probably never listened to even once after they were made.

It makes one think a bit about what one spends one’s time on.

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P.S. It's 11:11 on 1/11/11.

No soap, radio?

There are a lot of back to basics movements out there, involving all aspects of one’s life. I know a family of nine in my area that’s chosen to make their own clothes, heat their water on the stove, and such. There are lots of diet alternatives, including veganism, raw-food diets, and various attempts to eat only what cavemen did (and never mind that the lifespan of the caveman wasn’t so long).

I’d never heard, before, though, about folks who don’t use soap. But BoingBoing can always be relied on to find the interesting and the strange. The comments are very mixed, with many strongly supporting the idea, some saying I haven’t touched soap in [however long].

I get the concept, but I don’t really see how it works with the way we currently live. Probably no one cared whether the cave man was clean, but we do, and a good rinse and a wipe with a wet cloth doesn’t always do it. Surfactants may remove body oils, important or not, as sort of collateral damage... but they also help us get the crap off of us. What does one do when one has sworn off soap and one gets really grimy?

My favourite comment is number 20:

I really would not want to eat dinner at this man’s house.
No, it’s okay, I rinsed the chicken blood off my hands with pure, clean water! My skin is so soft and smooth, why would you worry about food poisoning?

Indeed.

More stuff we don’t need

When I was travelling recently, I decided to browse the Sky Mall catalogue in the plane. Man, is that chock full of stuff we don’t need, far more seriously so (and at much higher prices) than the catalogues I’d found junk in the last time.

Let’s look at some of the silliest, complete with scans from the catalogue. Click on each small image for a larger, readable one.

The Canine Genealogy Kit

For $60 you can get your dog a DNA test. I really don’t know how much I can say about this, other than to note that they think a photo of a cute dog can sell pretty much anything. Well, and that it’s hard to think of a sillier way to waste $60.

The Water Squirting Remote Controlled Car

I’ll first note that this is labelled for ages 6 and up. Now, imagine buying your 6-year-old a $100 toy that drives around the house at up to 11 miles an hour in agile pursuit of targets, and that squirts water up to 15 feet. You hope it’s water in there, anyway.

Trust me: when I was six, you would not have wanted me to get my hands on one of these. Really.

The All Terrain Polaris Ride On

While we’re on too-expensive toys for six-year-olds, let’s have a look at this electric buggy, complete with radio. In and of itself, there’s nothing to complain about here — a nice little ride-on toy for the kiddies. For ages 5 to 10. Cool. But then we look at the price: $1,115, including the shipping. OK, I think a thousand dollars is a bit steep for a toy for a six-year old, don’t you?

The Authentic Southern Sweet Tea Brewer

When I was a lad — and now that I’m not, as well, come to think of it — I made iced tea by putting tea bags in a pitcher and pouring in hot water. That seemed easy enough, and it never occurred to me that one might need a gadget for it.

It occurred to the Hammacher Schlemmer people, though, and this is the result: for $50, you get get a thing that mixes the hot water and the tea and the sugar for you. And, in case you had any doubt, it can also make unsweetened tea.

You don’t need it.

The SpyEar

This doo-dad looks like a pen holder, but is really a surveillance device (wink-wink). Specifically, it’s a cell phone that will silently receive calls and let you listen to whatever it can hear. Isn’t modern technology wonderful?

But the part that I like is this: Best of all, the SpyEar features a working digital face with a clock, calendar, and thermostat. I presume they mean thermometer, but, really, it’s a clandestine surveillance device, but best of all it’s also a digital clock. Ooookay, fine.

Home decor options

Finally, we have these things, for folks that have all their taste in their mouths. A friend and I can’t figure out which is more hideous. I say it’s The Grand Ruler Life-Size Anubis Statue, for $1300 including shipping. My friend goes for the Basho the Sumo Wrestler Glass-Topped Table, only $260. Just from a price perspective, it’s hard to beat the Anubis monstrosity. But, hey: would you have either one in your living room?

Which has your vote for the worse of the two?

Quote of the week

From The Tenth Inning, we have Barry Bonds telling reporters that he didn’t care about being booed as he was close to breaking Hank Aaron’s career home-run record:

You gotta have a lot of talent to have 50,000 people shout that you suck.

He does have a point there. They booed him, but they came to see it anyway.

[Paraphrased, because I didn’t write it down soon enough to remember it exactly.]

Who is talking about heart health?

On yesterday’s Brian Lehrer Show, a talk show on the local public radio station:

Joy Behar on Heart Health
Friday, October 01, 2010

Joy Behar, comedienne and co-host of The View, discusses heart health and the Mom’s Second Chance campaign.

That’s nice. But, here: a comedienne/host of a fluffy morning TV talk show... discusses heart health. Serious credentials, there, wot?

How ’bout we get, oh, I don’t know, maybe a cardiologist to come on and discuss heart health? Yes, that sounds better.

A follow-up on the postal worker

Last week I wrote about a postal worker who spewed a foul tirade while he delivered the mail. Frisky070802 suggested, in the comments, that I should talk with the postmaster about it, just in case this really indicated trouble brewing.

I decided to do that.

I got the phone number of the office the guy works out of, and called it. I called at 9:00, at 9:20, at 9:30, at 10:00, and once or twice more on Wednesday morning. No one answered the phone.

I had to mail a package, so I made a point of going to that post office to do it, about 1:30 Wednesday afternoon. When I was done, and the clerk asked if there was something else she could do for me, I said that I’d like to speak with the postmaster about another matter. She said she didn’t think the postmaster was in right now, but she’d check. She told me that the postmaster had told them never to page her, and that she — the clerk — had never been able to get the postmaster to come out and talk with anyone.

The clerk asked if it was about my mail delivery, and I said yes, sort of. She paged the supervisor of the carriers, instead, which seemed right. He didn’t respond to the page. She tried again. Then she paged the customer service manager. He also didn’t respond, even after she tried a second time, and a third. Finally, she gave me his direct phone number, and said that he wouldn’t answer when I called, but I could leave a voice-mail message that way. I thanked her for her help, and left.

I did call the number, I did get voice-mail, and I did leave a detailed message. I left my number for a call-back, but, given my experience at the station, and what the clerk told me, I don’t expect to hear anything.

This is horrendous. The customer service manager, and he won’t come out and talk with a customer? They don’t answer their phones, ever? And the postmaster, the overall supervisor of the place, tells people never to page her?

I know they’re busy, but really: they have jobs they’re supposed to do, and part of the job of a supervisor — and especially of a customer service manager — is to deal with customers who need something that the front-desk staff can’t help them with. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect them to handle this sort of thing.

I’m going to try to report this whole incident somewhere else in the USPS, though I have no confidence that anyone will do anything. Maybe I’ll write my congressman about it, the next time the USPS wants to raise the postal rates.

Postal postal worker?

On one of the postal routes near me, the regular carrier has Fridays off, so there’s a substitute on Fridays. I was taking a walk yesterday afternoon, and encountered this week’s sub as he delivered mail on the other side of the street. He was not happy.

He was muttering the whole time I could hear him, and none too quietly. At first, I thought he was talking on a mobile phone, but when it got to where I could understand what he was saying, this is what I heard, which I typed into my BlackBerry verbatim:

Fuck this. Fucking torture, putting the mail in the fucking box. Fucking pricks. They can give this fucking job to the [didn’t get the word]. Mother fucker! Fucking infested shit-hole.

And then I walked out of ear-shot.

Not happy at all!

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Update, 12 Sep: See here to find out what happened when I tried to report this to the post office.

Seattle vs New York

I flew out to Seattle yesterday, for the Collaboration, Electronic messaging, Anti-Abuse and Spam Conference, which has started this morning (Michael O’Reirdan, the chair of MAAWG, has this morning’s keynote talk).

As the plane approached Sea-Tac Airport, we did so from the north, passing Seattle on our right. A young boy at the window in the row in front of me, travelling with his grandparents, looked out his window and exclaimed, New York City!

No, said his grandmother, That’s another city. That’s Seattle.

The boy recognized that she must be right: This city doesn’t have as much... as tall buildings.

Indeed not. But that’s a feature, not a bug.

Just something light

I’m in need of light blogging today, so we’re just going to collect a few light things — some silly, some bizarre, some just... light.

• In the people with more time than sense category, we have a page of photos of dogs dressed up in lobster outfits. It doesn’t get much more bizarre. [Via BoingBoing.]
• In the people with no sense whatsoever category, we have an unfortunate incident in which a sister violently attacked her brother because he wanted her to cook with butter instead of margarine. [Again, via BoingBoing.]
• There’s this New York Times article about a woman in Concord, Massachusetts, who has convinced the town to ban bottled water. I have sympathy: there’s nothing sillier than paying those ridiculous prices for plastic bottles of water. But, what, you’d rather drive people to buy soda instead? OK, yeah: that’s sillier.
• And then you just have to love the headline on this article from New Scientist. The article’s just so-so, but when you have a headline like On the trail of Tutankhamen’s penis, all is right with the world.

Pre-need... battery changing?

I recently had cause to call for cable TV repair service, and during the (brief) time I was on hold I heard part of a cycle of recorded tips for callers. In one of the tips, they noted that if you’re having trouble with your remote control, you should try changing the batteries — most of the time, the problem turns out to be weak batteries. They go on to add...

We also recommend changing the batteries periodically, to ensure uninterrupted use of your remote control.

Um. Yeah, really? I find it entirely adequate to change the batteries when they’re weak, and see no need to do it prophylactically. It’s not like it’s a smoke detector, or some such. If I find the batteries to need changing, I can change them then. What’s the point of doing it pre-need, other than to use up more batteries by changing them when they’re still good?

Happy, frolicking day...

Thoughts on lawn mowing

I mowed my lawn last week, the first time for the season. I thought I might make it wait until May, but it didn’t quite... and the weather was so nice for it, that day.

It’s not always, of course, the weather. In the dog days,^[1] when New York hits the upper 90s in both degrees Fahrenheit and percent humidity, it can be a pretty miserable hour. At those times, I’ve thought of finding a neighbourhood kid to do it, as I used to do for others in Florida, forty years ago.

Back then, I got $5 for a lawn. Well, except for my own: my father only gave me $1. On the other hand, Dad also took care of the food and clothing, and bought me lots of other things I wanted, so I think I can give him a break on the lawn thing. Anyway, gasoline prices have gone up by a factor of about ten since then, so at the same rate of increase, I guess I’d expect to pay at least $50 now.

But whenever I think about doing that, I back off. I actually like doing the lawn, even in those dog days. It’s a kind of zen thing, a meditative activity, the drone of the mower acting as a sort of mantra as I go to and fro, to and fro, across the yard, some sixty feet one way and then sixty feet the other, over and over for an hour, thinking about whatever comes to mind. I’d miss that time of enforced meditation.

Sometimes, what I think about turns into something on these pages.

Like this.

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^[1] And where does that idiom come from?

NEFFA

Off to NEFFA this weekend, so no blogging. Back here on Monday.

Quiet blog today

Day of rest....

Happy retirement to two former colleagues

IBM has, as you might have seen in the news or rumour mills, done another “resource action” — what folks colloquially call a “layoff”, though it doesn’t fit the usual meaning of the term (they won’t be rehiring the people when business gets better). I’ve learned that today is the last day of work for at least two of my former and valued colleagues from Research Division.

David Singer is a Distinguished Engineer at the Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA. He’s in the IBM Academy of Technology, has been around since, it seems, before the Norman invasion, and has always been someone we could turn to for technical or business advice.

Nick Trio is a Senior Technical Staff Member, as I was when I left. He’s been on the Internet Society’s Advisory Council for some time, and has done work on IBM’s internal network and the Internet for many years. As with David, I’ve known him since I transferred to the Research Division, and have relied on him many times.

Once again, IBM is discarding its brightest, most experienced, most devoted technical experts in their effort to reduce U.S. staff and shift to Brazil, Russia, India, and China (“the BRIC”). It’s so sad, and it just seems the wrong decision.