Category: HT archives

Here’s a human-computer interaction idea…

We’re working on modifying some of our applications at work so they’re compatible with some software for visually impaired users. The way to tell if we’ve done it right, apparently, is to shut off the monitor, disconnect the mouse and then do useful things with the apps. Wait a minute, we’re in a cost cutting phase, so why not give everyone this software and stop buying monitors and mice? We’d also save money on lighting. Taking this a step further, we could really reduce the user “footprint” by inventing keyboard pants, where the keys are on the users’ thighs (although “Esc” would be accomplished through a severe groin pounding, thus reinforcing the company’s mission statement of “don’t screw up”). Now we’ve got a room full of users in chairs, naw, stools, fewer distractions and way less overhead.

You think I’m kidding, but wait 5 years…. Incidentally, I wonder if keyboard pants would help fight carpal tunnel…

Ah, the random thoughts of the day…

I was going to link an article that I saw this morning about the feds clearing out an Alberta jail to make room for next month’s anticipated G8 protesters, but the link has mysteriously vanished – it doesn’t show up in the original site’s search or anywhere on Google. How odd. For posterity, they’ve freed up 400 spots by moving provincial offenders to a federal prison or something.

Moving to health news, I have it on very good authority (my authority, actually), that a sprained foot can’t be cured by giving it a good workout to loosen up tight muscles. This is the second injury to my left leg in as many months, so I’m really hoping for that bionic stuff to show up on store shelves soon. I’d be willing to sign a waiver giving up my rights to become a super villain if I could just get some groovy sound effects going while I trot to work.

Speaking of work, here’s a crappy way to start the week – I got my annual pension statement, which tells me how much money I’ll be getting when I retire. In 2038. That’s only 13121 days away, so please start planning the party soon. I’m pretty sure that this statement is in the top 5 demoralizing things my company does to me. Why go through the trouble of pointing out how long I’m (theoretically) stuck so I can plan my retirement income with monetary amounts that won’t mean anything by the time the fateful day comes? I’d like to see a memo that says “when you retire in 2038, you will receive 2 oatmeal cookies and a boat every month”. It’d make the same amount of sense, and it’s something I could visualize.

I’m not going to hunt for the links, but it seems like there’ve been a lot of reports this week of people shooting themselves in the groin. They claim it’s accidental, but who knows… Whenever I see a trend in the news, I have to wonder if the actual frequency of the event is increasing or if it’s just the reporting of the event that’s going up. I mean, come on, people have been sticking guns down their pants for years in the movies, there’s got to be a decent rate of misfiring going on. Imagine if gun makers were to look into this as a marketing gimmick – “the new Smith & Wesson 392 Omega Destroyathoner has been specially designed to reduce the risk of blowing your own nuts off”, as the camera pans through the test labs…

Are there any vegans or vegetarians out there who don’t play the grocery game? Who doesn’t do a quick scan of the purchases of the stranger in front of you at the checkout, looking for meat, egg and dairy free selections? For some it’s a game for singles, but apparently it’s become my obsession. Be they man, women, child or mongoose, I relentlessly observe, because if I actually see a vegan food order, it’s like winning the lottery. I don’t have any plans to talk to anyone during the event, unless – oh, wouldn’t this be weird – they’re playing the same game with my plastic bags of greens and nuts and grains, in which case I don’t know what would happen. It’s like vegan motivation too – today I saw an early-thirties woman buying a bunch of those Michelinas or however you spell them TV dinners (all with meat and/or cheese), and a big thing of Metamucil. It averaged out to something like six bucks an item, and damn, why are you buyng Metamucil in your early thirties? I think to date I’ve only had two vegan “wins”, which, granted, is more times than I’ve won the lottery, but still, I think I’m scoring ok. You know, “scoring”, as in getting points. At the grocery game.

In the other sense of scoring, it’s always interesting how one can have a sense of mastery over inter-gender communication (and non-communication) when one is attached and has no actual interest in or need for reciprocation. In other words, I’m happily living with AngelA, and I’m convinced that women (and what the hell, possibly men) hit on me all the time. If I was single, I’d be wrong, but for some reason I’m sure I’m right every time, because there’s no risk involved. I subscribe a little bit to the concepts used by people who do affirmations and stuff – I believe that one can script reality freely, except I think it can only be done so that it doesn’t affect your life whatsoever.

I feel like I should have a “lastly”…but I don’t.

I finally made it to Whole Foods Market today with the rest of the TVA Saturday legion of chocolate-lovin’ mayhem. I’d heard some negative things about the place, but I’ve gotta say, any place with four kinds of organic kale is alright by me. I didn’t check out much of the rest of the place, but I managed to get a ton of organic produce for about 10 bucks. The selection is good enough to make going organic a viable option – up to now, I’d see maybe one or two things a week that were in the right price/quality region for me to buy at my usual grocery store.

Even better, I didn’t get a chance to eat any of the new veggies because AngelA made a kick-ass ass kicking curry that will gladly go to your house and kick your ass. It was that good.

Speaking of TVA and ass kicking, I forgot to mention earlier that the latest TVA newsletter is in my possession. So far the only typo we’ve found was in one of my articles. See, there is a bright side to not putting your name on anything. Still, we sold some books today that I haven’t seen sold in all the years I’ve been helping there, and they were ones we mentioned in the newsletter. Sweet.

…Insert contrived segue here…

I’ve come to understand why first year university students have such a hard time with economics classes. They hear this stuff about supply and demand, and how more demand means higher prices. I went to HMV today, and all the new stuff that gets played on the radio all the time is 10 bucks cheaper than the stuff you have to seek out. For those of you that are paying attention, that’s a whole backpack of organic groceries. Why does the stuff most likely to sell cost less?

As for why I was in HMV, I discovered a great use for Google Sets – put in the names of three bands you like, and it’ll give you a list of others that you might enjoy. This is something Batman would appreciate. Not the “name a band” bit, but the whole set technology.

…So I’m killing time at some art event last night, and I notice someone’s got a committee member nametag that says Marilyn Churley. The name was printed, so I couldn’t match it to the signature that Ontario residents saw on elevator licenses for many years, but it turned out that it was indeed the former minister of Consumer and Commercial relations. For someone so tightly tied to elevators (in my mind anyway), I thought she’d be taller. I wasn’t feeling very social last night, and I didn’t have my camera with me, which is kinda too bad because it looks like she’s the NDP’s environment critic these days, so we might’ve had something to talk about. In theory. More likely, I’d just keep talking about the elevators. Oh well, my coworkers will be impressed, even if you’re not.

Due to ongoing pain in my right hand and wrist, I’ve started to use my left hand for more stuff, both to give my right a rest and to warm it up in case the situation worsens. You won’t believe how many little muscles are in the hand, and how weak some of them can be. I couldn’t even eat half of my meal with chopsticks. Of course, these were right handed chopsticks, so I had a bit of a handicap.

I’ve picked up a $3 a day kale habit, which means I need my job more than ever. My goal now is to have the strangest possible diet to alienate anyone who asks me what vegans eat. Since most of these questions come up while people are eating, and Carol Adams says it’s a lousy time to talk about vegetarianism anyway, I figure it’s no great loss. This diet plan is easier to accomplish than my earlier idea of spreading the protein-carbohydrate-fat breakdown over a week, so you eat nothing but carbs for 4 days, just protein for 2, and, yeah, it’s the idea of a day of nothing but fat that stopped me. Ugh.

Another fun fact from cottage living: lobsters have really humungous eyes and no claws or tails. I think that this is a fair vegan assessment, since we tend to block out the bad images from the grocery store, and you don’t see wild lobster often.

I still haven’t downloaded my pictures from the trip. It’s all that new memory card’s fault. At the rate I take pictures, 128 meg on a 2.3 megapixel camera is like infinite film. Tomorrow for sure, honest, well, maybe not, but damn, it’s fun to taunt.

New music from the trip: Saves the Day and Dashboard Confessional. Similar and more fun to listen to at work than the politics on the other side of the cubical wall. They should make office emo music, with big wailing songs about getting stabbed in the back and getting passed on the corporate ladder. It could be some weird form of capitalistic outreach or something, because we’re not brainwashed enough. Kids could dream of being passed over for promotions and taking cardboard boxes of their possessions home to their families after getting laid off.

In other news, I gave money to total strangers today. It was weird, and I still feel like an asshole walking downtown, but maybe less so. We’ll see.

Thoughts and lessons learned upon returning from a cottage trip, in no particular order:

When an axe isn’t available, a 20 pound sledgehammer is a decent substitute for making big wood into little wood.

I can work out 5 days a week and I’ll still break several parts of my body within 5 minutes of running through a forest.

I seriously suck at Balderdash. Seeing as only two people chose my definitions in the whole game, I really could’ve gone with my first instincts involving the word “fart” every time. Cool points to me for knowing what “agitprop” was though.

Two days is all it took for me to lose my resistance to city allergies. I’m sniffling and snorting like you wouldn’t believe tonight. Oddly, I felt amazing surrounded by strange flora and fauna.

After popping in for surprise visits to each parent only to find an empty house leads me to the only obvious conclusion – my parents are super secret agents for some government agency that doesn’t even have a name.

When there’s only one heater and two cabins, a good lesson in sharing would be to put everyone in the same cabin. A better lesson in sharing is to take the heater away so the other people can learn the lesson that sharing makes you really cold.

Dinky Twigs is a one legged bounty hunter who will never be as cool as Boba Fett. He makes some money on the side by giving speeding tickets to out of towners who probably won’t come back to defend the ticket. This might just be the funniest thing ever, but it’s hard to back that up with facts this far after the fact.

Jokes about one legged people become a lot funnier when you can’t walk. (I’m better now)

There’s a possibility of a photo or two to replace the angry ball of science, but I’m in catchup mode for now. ‘Night all.

I have offcially survived AngelA’s birthday. She even says she’s happy. I might just believe her. Life is good.

In other news, I just started my first Palm Pilot program. I bought a IIIxe something like 2 years ago with the rationalization of learning about handheld development, but never actually got around to it. It turns out to be not so tricky, at least for the basic stuff, but it’s no fun working from a book you bought 2 or 3 revisions of the OS ago. Still, I managed to install a development environment and get something on the screen in an afternoon or so, so I’ll give myself a pat on the back. Now to migrate to the Mac…

The Palms are going to be the crutch for the weekend – we’re going to some kind of cottage where they don’t have phone lines, let alone computers. I haven’t been that technology free for about 5 years, and I’m not sure how I’ll take it. Alcohol will ease any transition pain, I guess, but I’m finding the concept to be a scary one – what if I find out that I like living without computers? I might find myself going outside or something. This won’t do.

Fun link for the day – here’s what’s wrong with guns. Or people who own guns. Or people who hang out with people who own guns. Whatever.

I’m going back into Memento-mode. I can’t focus my thoughts on anything for more than thirty seconds, and my brain is trying to compensate by fooling itself into believing that thinking about something is the same as doing something. Oddly, I don’t watch TV.

I used to read a lot of conspiracy theories, but I got out of it when I started to find them on the front page of the paper. I did raise my eyebrows a bit on this one about how much Bush knew about the September 11 attack before it happened. There’s this quote in there: “But the president did not — not — receive information about the use of airplanes as missiles by suicide bombers“. Was that extra “not” for emphasis, or were they trying to create a double negative so they can say they didn’t lie if they ever have to testify? Just being picky. Anal. Whatever.

So yeah, we saw the new Star Wars movie last night, or this morning, the 12:01 show. Wasn’t planned, just happened. My favourite review quote came from a Slashdot comment: “it must be cold on Tatooine“. You’ll understand when you see it. Probably. The movie was long, but they had about three movies of stuff in there, so it needed the length. Most of the film was action oriented, except for some stuff that wasn’t. It’s hard to give a review without giving stuff away, so let me just say that there is kicking of ass, and there is ass getting kicked. It’s a lot of fun, I’m going to see it again, and most importantly, it’s not episode one. We can all relax and cut up Phantom Menace as much as we want now, because there’s an alternative out there. A week ago the faults in Menace were forgivable because it was all we had, but life’s better now, kinda like 1200 baud vs broadband. Oh, the other thing about the new movie (I don’t ever need to refer to the title, it’s just “the new movie”) – it’s not marketed to eight year olds. As much. Sweet.

It’s AngelA’s birthday! Send happy emails to this address. I just finished wrapping everything, and it looks like despite my messed up schedule this past month, I’m going to make it without a lot of IOUs. I hope she likes everything, because if I’m not mistaken I’m clear until Christmas. Phew.

Here’s the kind of fun that I get to deal with: we just sat down to watch some Simpsons and enjoy some of AngelA’s sloppy joes when the phone rings. Here’s an approximate transcript:

me: Hello?
some guy: Hi, can I speak to [Herman]?
It doesn’t sound like a telemarketer…
me: Speaking…
some guy: Hi, this is Brandon.
I don’t know any Brandons…do I?
*Pause*
Brandon: I was just visiting your adult website.
Cold chill down spine. Someone I don’t know is calling me at home about VP. I can’t think of a single scenario where this could go well.
me: ok…
Brandon: I sell a brand of penis enlarging pills and run ads on over a hundred websites. If you run one of them, you’ll find you get a lot more hits.
Ok, this is some strange phone spam. Way strange phone spam. How can running an ad give ME more traffic? And more importantly, why would the guy want to run the ads on a vegan site?
me: You’re actually serious?
Brandon: Oh yeah, you’ll get hundreds more hits.
me: No, I mean you actually want me to run an ad for penis enlarging pills?
Brandon: Yeah, they’re really great.
me: So you’ve been to my site, eh?
Brandon: yep.
me: How’d you like all the naked women?
Brandon: Great stuff.
me: Which site are we talking about?
Brandon: Um…[checking]…VegasPorn.com. No, I mean VeganPorn.com.
While he was checking I asked AngelA if we needed any penis enlarging pills. She said no.
me: There aren’t any naked women on that site.
Brandon: Errr… Let me check… “This is not an actual porn site” [likely from the Google description]. Ah. Um. What is this anyway?
me: It’s a news and information site for vegans. Vegans don’t eat meat eggs or dairy, and they have big dicks, so they don’t need your pills. You know, because they eat healthy and stuff and they get so much sex.
Brandon: Ok, yeah, I guess you, um…
me: Bye…

I normally try to keep telemarketers on the line for as long as I can, but this situation caught me a bit off balance. I’ve got his number from caller ID, and I’m kinda tempted to post it, but I think it’d be better if I just left things as they are. All in all, it’s an interesting life, being a vegan pornographer…

Complete left turn ahead: you may have overstepped your marketing campaign when you take a soccer action figure, put Spiderman’s head on it, and try to sell it as a “Spider Man Adventure Hero“. There’s a whole series of these, and if they weren’t $25 bucks a pop up here, I’d seriously consider getting some just because it’s so bizarre. It’s like putting a Darth Vader head on a My Little Pony and…hmmm…gotta go, there’s cash to be made!