Start hoarding the TP

Divine.com, formerly Open Market, is our neighbor who was recently in the news for informing their employees making more than $60k per year that they would be receiving a 50% pay cut for the month of May and a 3.8% reduction thereafter. The parking lot remains full even though many deride the company for such extreme measures.

Here at Nokia the economising has come in much more subtle ways in the past year, last week we were asked to conserve on energy as much as possible and this week all of the building flora will be removed to save on the cost of plant maintenance by Rentokil [ pronounced Rent-to-kill and is the best company name ever :) ]. I've decided that I will bring a couple of rolls of toilet paper to work and hide them in my desk just in case they decide to cut the last perk we have; fresh, soft and complimentary toilet paper.

permalink Ω 30 April 2002, Helsinki

Mad Science in the Kitchen

I don't know if Einstein really had a cook and, as a theoretical physicist, he probably sucked at something so concrete as applied organic chemistry, but What Einstein Told His Cook: Kitchen Science Explained may be an interesting read. It's probably a popular science version of the outstanding Cookwise.

permalink Ω 30 April 2002, Helsinki

Ben Dova Ben Bova

From the it's-late-and-I'm-easily-amused department, Ben Bova has released a new book The Rock Rats which is apparently a victim of a very amusing misprint of his name [ local copy since Amazon removed it ]. For the Massachusetts Townese impaired, Ben Dova is equivalent to Bend Over.

n.b. - A trip to the local Barnes & Noble reveals that this is an Amazon.com prank or goof which makes it even more amusing :)

permalink Ω 30 April 2002, Helsinki

Bunny slipper mission redux

Undaunted by the unavailability of adult size bunny slippers I decided to make my own just like McGuyver would do if bunny slippers could be made from Duct tape. I had considered Titanic slippers for my enormous size 10US/41EUR feet but I couldn't control my lust for bunny cuteness. :)

So, should you wish to make a pair for yourself, it's pretty easy to do.

I. Materials

• A pair of boiled wool slippers from Garnet Hill [ product #4664 ]
• 2 black 1-1.5 inch pom-pons
• Felt for ears in a matching colour to slippers and pink. I used needled cotton batting for the ears since I couldn't find any nice wool felt.
• 20 guage copper wire for bendy ears
• 1 skein of black DMC crewel thread
• 1 skein of pink DMC embroidery thread
• 1 skein of ecru or dark grey embroidery thread to match slipper colour
• 1 crewel needle
• 1 embroidery needle
• 1 pencil or fabric pencil
• 1 pair of scissors
• 1 tube Goop Crafter's contact adhesive
• a couple of pins

II. Attach Tail and stitch nose and eyes

• Take pom-pon and attach it to the back of the slipper with a length of the black crewel thread.
• With the pencil, mark a nose shape and two dots for eyes onto the slipper.
• With the crewel needle and the black crewel thread, cover the nose area completely using a satin stitch.
• The eyes are made of French knots
• The whiskers are made by taking a double strand of the black crewel thread and looping it under the nose and tying it off on the edge threads. When tied off, you may cut and style.

III. Making The Ears

• Cut out 8 pieces shaped like an almond of the felt in the colour that matches your slippers and 4 pieces slightly smaller in the pink colour.
• Take the Goop adhesive and the copper wire and attach a piece of copper to the middle of the almond shaped felt. Do this for 4 times and set them aside to dry.
• The remaining 4 pieces of matching felt and the pink felt should be stitched together using a back stitch down the center of the pink felt piece using the embroidery needle and 2 strands of the pink embroidery thread.
• Using a piece of ear with the copper wire, coat the felt [ copper side up ] with Goop Adhesive and place the piece with the pink felt attached on top of it with the pink felt up.
• Sew up the edges using the embroidery needle and 2 strands of the matching thread with the blanket stitch.
• Now you should be ready to attach them to the slipper using the same needle and thread using a back stitch.
• You now have bunny slippers, enjoy! :)

permalink Ω 28 April 2002, Helsinki

Build your own heros

What ever happened to heros we could relate to in their unrealistic superpowers? Kids these days are now being offered George Bush and Rudy Guilliani as 'heros'.

However, you can order a custom action figure so maybe it's time we made Captain Perl a reality! :)

permalink Ω 27 April 2002, Helsinki

Scary Stories

If Lemony Snicket had a line of plush toys they would look like Scary Stories pets. I have resisted stuffed toys all my life but these are curiously magnetic :)

permalink Ω 25 April 2002, Helsinki

Bibliotheca Alexandrina

The long awaited revival of the ancient library at Alexandria, Bibliotheca Alexandrina, has opened to the public finally!

• Total site area: 40,000 m²
• Total Library floor areas: 69,000 m²
• No. of floors: 13
• No. of seats: 3500
• No. of volumes: 4-8 million
• No. of maps: 50,000
• No. of manuscripts: 100,000
• No. of electronic applications: 30 data bases
• No. of of rare books: 10,000
• No. of electronic materials: 100 CD-ROM titles
• No. of musical media: 200,000 disks/tapes
• No. of audio-visual material: 50,000 disks/videos
• No. of staff: 578
• Complex includes: Conference Center (3200 seats), science museum, planetarium, school of information studies, calligraphy institute and museum.

permalink Ω 25 April 2002, Helsinki

Richard Rhodes has a new book

Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer Prize winning author, has a new book being released on 7 may, Masters of Death: The SsEisatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust. It should be interesting reading following the book about the Wannsee meeting. Not exactly light reading, but certainly thoughtful reading in a time of war, aggression and religious jihad.

permalink Ω 25 April 2002, Helsinki

Gobi has a twin

There is either a visitor or a new employee at work this week but I've seen him a couple of times now and he's a complete ringer for Gobi, the college stoner played by Horatio Sanz on Saturday Night Live. I try not to smirk whenever he passes by but all I can think of is Gobi's infectious giggling :)

permalink Ω 25 April 2002, Helsinki

White American Godthic

My mother's response upon hearing that I had eloped last Summer to get married in Las Vegas to a guy whose name she still cannot spell was, "Why?". I suppose how else would a woman who was an MD in the 50s when the 'ideal' woman was not one who worked, much less had a profession or career, respond to a daughter who has managed to make a decent living without accumulating debt, a man or children along the way nearing her 4th decade on the planet. I have one answer, marriage legitimises a whole host of stuff in the US, ask anyone who is in a relationship where marriage is not recognised, especially if you are of two or more nationalities.

These days there is a whole backlash to marriage and kids whose most vocal proponents are obnoxious. I have no ticking clock and found The Baby Panic an interesting read while, at the same time, I kept wondering why we keep going through this same shit every damn decade. It is such an individual act with so many mitigating circumstances I bristle at those who would paint it so broadly as a "crisis". Hey, we don't have decent public education, socialised healthcare, adequate social services and families who have to work at 2 or more jobs just to make ends meet....why is it that a bunch of white girls with an education who aren't spawning a "crisis"? Ask Pat Buchanan I suppose. The Bush Administration is big on getting welfare people into marrying because we all know how well marriage solves all the social and financial problems people may have as they ride off into the sunset...

I'm tired of a world that just doesn't mind it's own damn business and be happy when people are doing their own thing instead of trying to mold them into their own narrow religious idea of the world. It's like being the poor singleton at a smug marrieds dinner party when they start asking you if you have a boyfriend or if you're pregnant...be married, have kids, just shut up and no more conversations about baby poop in mixed company. The human race won't be extinct anytime soon if a couple million white girls decide to skip having kids or don't get married!

permalink Ω 24 April 2002, Helsinki

Honey, I baked the children!

Amazon was cheeky enough to recommend How to be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking and, when I took a closer at the book, I must admit it's my kind of book since the author includes baking children in the table of contents. I guess the editor or author never played 'one of these things is not like the other' in gradeschool. :)

permalink Ω 24 April 2002, Helsinki

When we only had 0's

Since TPC is in San Diego again this year, The Computer Museum should be on the list of things to see as it just opened last May and appears to have some pretty interesting exhibits. Not to be confused with The Computing History Museum or The Computer History Museum.

If you're wondering what we did to look busy before the advent of computers in every cube, check out Yesterday's Office which has a nice collection of articles.

permalink Ω 22 April 2002, Helsinki

Spectacle Porn

After getting the insurance tango sorted, Jarkko agreed to go order a new pair of spectacles. He chose an Air Titanium frame called Pyrus that are the most amazing frames I've ever seen since they are extremely lightweight and have no screws in the construction. Now I want a pair in a fun colour and shape but feel indulgent since I just bought a new pair. I know they have glasses and such in Finland but maybe I could get away with thinking it couldn't hurt to stock up on an extra pair before moving to Helsinki :)

permalink Ω 22 April 2002, Helsinki

Elvis on Bravo

Bravo is going to have Elvis Costello, the most important and versatile artist in the last 50 years, on Musicians on Monday, 29 April. His new album, When I was Cruel will be in stores tomorrow. He sounds as good today as he did when I bought my first album of his on vinyl in 1976. I keep hoping he gets together with João Gilberto before he dies to record some awesome Bossa Nova as it's about the only thing he hasn't tried. :)

permalink Ω 22 April 2002, Helsinki

The Art of the Exhibit

Last December I purchased a Canon D30 camera and searched the net for a decent package to install for displaying them on the web. After about 2 weeks of hunting I found Pekka Saarinen's Photography on the Net where his own D30 Photos had me thinking that I was unworthy of such equipment and I emailed him to ask what software he was using. Well, he wrote it himself and he's finally released The Exhibit Engine for anyone frustrated by all the mediocre gallery utilities to use and enjoy :) Kiitos Pekka.

permalink Ω 22 April 2002, Helsinki

Technology and Culture

The Society for the History of Technology publishes a terrific quarterly journal Technology and Culture. The winter issue has a really interesting article, Voluntarism and the Fruits of Collaboration: The IBM User Group, Share on how the IBM user group Share began and what implications it had on collaboration and innovation. Since computing history seems to be coming into vogue this should be on every techno-historian's reading list.

permalink Ω 22 April 2002, Helsinki

Putting the museum to work

Dang, I knew I should have kept the old Commodore PET Pro I used to have along with the collection of computer antiques a former boyfriend was attached to since the business of data forensics is booming. Salon has an article, Digging for Computer Dirt, that will have us all kicking ourselves for not hanging on to those boat anchor-like relics in our basements.

permalink Ω 22 April 2002, Helsinki

Gastronomica

New England grocery stores are weird. When I first moved to Rockport the grocery stores required you to get a membership card of sorts to get the 'discounted' price on products in exchange for the opportunity for them to demographically track you and your purchases. The first major difference from any other US grocery store was found in the frozen food section; not 1, not 2 but 3 whole aisles filled with ice cream. I discovered that New England is the highest per capita consumers of ice cream in the US. The layout of the stores were wrong too as the aisles were narrow and the dairy and meat were at the beginning of the store instead of being near the check-out. The produce section was small and disappointing but the seafood counter was usually impressive. Meat, especially chicken was very expensive compared to the midwest prices.

Well, I know I'm getting old as I just discovered the best grocery store in the Boston Area and I'm excited about it; The Roche Bros.. They have an extensive deli/bakery/produce section with fresh products, reasonably priced meat and the dairy/frozen food section is the last thing you see before heading for the cashier. It's as though an engineer who shops designed the layout. Amazing. Oh, and the reciept is categorised! And they have baggers who have a concept of how to pack groceries and then wheel it out to your car. I feel a bit weird about them taking the cart out to the car still. Maybe everyone else has this, but since I left St. Louis with Dierberg's, I've lowered my expectations to meet the average New England grocery store. So long Shaw's/Star Market, Stop and Shop, Trader Joe's, Bread and Circus and every other grocery I ever had the misfortune to shop at.

Food is often the barometer of a culture and whenever I visit somewhere new I usually visit a grocery store just to get a handle on the people. Helsinki's grocery stores are small but there is a high premium placed on freshly baked goods, produce like fruits/berries and dairy. The packaging isn't as elaborate as the US and whole foods outnumber processed food. Finns lack Velveeta, call the Embassy. We took Jarkkos parents to the grocery when they visited last year and while she couldn't really articulate what she thought of it, I could tell his mother was entertained by the size of the store and the 50 varieties of mustard or 135 different cereals available. She asked me how I found the time to shop in such a store with all the choices. The US may only have 2 political parties but we have plenty of mustard produced by the monster food conglomerates to choose from :)

If you like food and culture then you will probably be interested in Gastronomica, a quarterly magazine and the new Modern Library Food Series including Endless Feasts: Sixty Years of Writing from Gourmet.

permalink Ω 22 April 2002, Helsinki

The Birds

I'm not fond of birds. There would always be a nest of them in the ivy outside my window when I was a kid and they would sing and sing especially if they knew I was asleep..or so it seemed. The movie The Birds galvanized my dislike of them. When I bought the house I live in presently I noticed that my house was the only one around that had shutters on the windows and now I know why; the dreaded Passer domesticus or House Sparrow.

My house is the local condo and hotel for these varmints. The incessant cheep-cheeping, the pooping all over the shutters, the damage to the house, etc. has caused me to entertain homicidal thoughts of these furry little bastards.

Too small to shoot they must be eradicated more efficiently. I won't poison them as I can't even do that to mice so perhaps I'll introduce a predator into the neighbourhood. Anyone have a screech owl they are willing to loan me for a month or two? :)

permalink Ω 21 April 2002, Helsinki

Secret Life of Food

Yesterday, while book shopping, I found the coolest and cutest book I have seen in a long while, The Secret Life of Food. I'm no chef but this is a book filled with food creations that imitate life with fairly easy recipes that even a cooking retard like me could manage to make without too much fuss. The meatball eyeballs are hilarious and the Jell-O Aquarium [ pictured above ] is something I'm definitely going to try making since Jell-O by itself is a pretty boring food but making an aquarium with it is simply brilliant :)

Jell-O Aquarium by Clare Crespo

Ingredients

• 1 gallon glass goldfish bowl
• 2 boxes Berry Blue Jell-O gelatin
• 1 can fruit cocktail
• gummi fish or plastic fish [ or print out some tropical fish on a colour printer, print the mirror image of them, cut them out, paste them together to create a fish on both sides then laminate them ]
• plastic aquarium plant [ optional but really adds something to it ]

Directions

1. Prepare the Jell-O as per the directions on the box. Pour into fishbowl.
2. Drain fruit cocktail and slowly pour it into the goldfish bowl. This is the 'gravel'. If you have the plastic tank plant, add it before pouring in the fruit cocktail and hold it in place until the cocktail anchors it on the bottom.
3. Place fishbowl into refrigerator to thicken for an hour to partially set.
4. Remove from refrigerator and place fish in the gelatin using a stick or utensil to position them.
5. Return the fishbowl to the refridgerator to set completely and firmly.
6. Serve with a spoon and don't eat the plastic bits :)

permalink Ω 21 April 2002, Helsinki

Hell hath no fury

The Catholic Church is getting a lot of attention these days due to practices we all used to joke and trade stories about in gradeschool but there's another controversy brewing that could be far more troublesome for the church; Bake Sale grannies aren't sharing the profits in protest. There's nothing that gets the attention of the Catholic Church faster than multi-million dollar lawsuits and parishners passing on the tithe...oh, and women wanting to be clergy.

As an American woman in her 30s, I have always felt equal to men in the workplace and at home. Only at church do I feel an injustice and powerlessness that I encounter in no other area of my life. Only at church am I marginalized. It's simple: Priests are men. Therefore, men run things in the church. When an associate pastor spoke vehemently one Sunday several years ago, in a sort of my church love it or leave it homily, about why women could never be priests in the Catholic Church, I could only sit and seethe.

Go ahead, I thought, tell my daughters one more time why they're not good enough. He's mistaken, I told them later. Sexism is a sin, just like racism. I think by the time you're grown-ups, women will be priests. That's what I'm praying for.

Funny, my mother said the same thing to me and my sisters 30 years ago. Bake cookies for the needy and the starving and save your prayers sister as the Church ain't changing anytime soon.

permalink Ω 18 April 2002, Helsinki

Pass the remote

The Economist has an insteresting and informative collection of articles Survey: Television available to non-subscribers.

This survey will look at where television is going, and who stands to benefit. It will concentrate on America and Western Europe, because together they account for the vast majority of the world's television market, and others are likely to follow where they lead. The survey will argue that, despite all those costly efforts to transform it into an all-purpose multimedia device, the television set will remain primarily a screen to keep people entertained. Although the digital era will vastly widen the choice of entertainment on TV, it will leave its potency as a mass medium undiminished. It will, however, overturn the way television is consumed.

permalink Ω 18 April 2002, Helsinki

Dot Gone Art

Still have some business cards to find a use for after making your dot bomb icosahedron? Don't despair, make them into a Dot-Gone Art Show!

permalink Ω 18 April 2002, Helsinki

Warm up the glue gun!

In the spirit of the old VAX Tap, ReadyMade Magazine has an article on How to turn your PC into a Coffee Table along with geek accessible crafts ala Martha Stewart.

permalink Ω 18 April 2002, Helsinki

The Gathering Storm

HBO has a movie premiering on 27 April about Winston Churchill, The Gathering Storm. Both Albert Finney and Vanessa Redgrave star in this sure to be excellent film.

permalink Ω 17 April 2002, Helsinki

The longest 7 minutes of your life

In the ladies room at The Burren, an Irish pub complete with Irish beertenders and Guinness, I noticed a flyer for a Seven Minutes event. It's like speed dating with 14 dates over 90 minutes. I may just attend as a spectator for the amusement. With dating like this who wouldn't go back to arranged marriages?! :) At least there is plenty of beer nearby to ease the pain if it goes badly.

permalink Ω 17 April 2002, Helsinki

Wicked Hawt

Gnat's mention of the redneck neighbor made me think about making a page for my Townie neighbors as they are strangely familiar...father/grandpa lives on one side and his son's family lives behind him which can make for 'interesting times'.

• They have a german shepherd named Chief who roams the neighborhood freely and particularly loves to come to my fence and bark at my dog who eyes him like a noonday snack.
• They love to hoover their SUV frequently with a shop-vac that is louder than a 747 at takeoff. Saturday morning around 8am is the preferred time to start hoovering their prized auto.
• I don't know how many kids actually live there but when the warm weather comes there is always a crowd and one of the little girls has an ulltrasonic scream that pierces the air like a rocket.
• Every winter they make a wooden form which they line with plastic and fill with water to make a skating rink for the kids.
• Today it has reached 100F so out has come the giant inflatable pool complete with floating chair and 6-pack of beer.
• Grandpa, a.k.a. "Buzz" likes to hassle me about "where's that man of yours" whenever I'm out mowing the grass since, in his view of the world, it doesn't matter that I like mowing the grass as my man should be mowing it for me.

Townies around here are also known as Massholes. I can always find them at work whenever someone introduces a Finn named "Pekka" [ pronounced peck-ar in townese ] and they titter like little kids.

permalink Ω 17 April 2002, Helsinki

Sproink Spring

The first hot day of the year has arrived. I'm sweating, I'm uncomfortable, I feel fat and am sticking to my clothes, the pollen is giving me a sinus headache and I have homicidal urges towards the tweety house finches nesting in the window shutters. 90 degrees? What happened to spring showers and cool weather that normally comes before summer? grawr.

permalink Ω 16 April 2002, Helsinki

Why not Vermillion?

The Aegean Park Press just made my day by publishing M-30, Japanese Diplomatic Secrets as I have been hunting for over a year now in hopes of finding the algorithm for the purple, jade and coral ciphers used in WWII by the Japanese. If I ever actually find it I'll write Crypto::Purple/Coral/Jade for CPAN. It contains nearly 1200 pages on CD-ROM in PDF format. Apparently it was authored by the same guy who published the classic book about the Black Chamber but was censored from being published before now. The Man Who Broke Purple is an excellent read if you're interested in Purple but be sure to get an edition with all the pages since some of the early printings had an error and are missing the last 50 or so.

Of course, they have oodles of other cool books on a wide range of cryptologic and intelligence topics too. If credit cards could groan, mine would be screaming. :)

permalink Ω 16 April 2002, Helsinki

Colonial D

Could Jack Black be related to Paul Revere? The resemblance is uncanny, much like Larry Wall and Weird Al :)

permalink Ω 16 April 2002, Helsinki

It's the tricorn hat

Patriot's Day wasn't something I was familiar with until I moved to Boston since some places of business were closed for the holiday and I asked what in the hell was going on. I try to let this holiday pass without notice but the Patriot's Day parade and festivites woke me up this morning with bagpipes and marching bands. I really hate parades and have since I was a kid. Loud. Noisy. Stupid. Next time I buy a house I'll be sure to check if it's on a parade route :)

The Boston Marathon is also a feature of Patriot's Day each year and this year a few patriotic Kenyan's won. In fact, 1st thru 4th of the men and 1st and 2nd of the women were Kenyan. The only way I'd run down the street, much less 26 miles, would be to have a lion chasing me but I guess the Kenyan people have had enough experience with that :)

permalink Ω 15 April 2002, Helsinki

Infernal Revenue Squad

Today is the day US Tax forms are due unless you filed for an extension. I used to love waiting until midnite with my 1040EZ to drive down to the post office and get in line for the drive-by postal drop the USPS usually has every year at larger post offices. It was always a party as you had lots of people celebrating waiting until the end to hang on to their money or simply protesting taxation but, fearing the long arm of the IRS, paying up at the last minute. I was on the local news one year when a few friends and I lurched towards the post office like tax lemmings and the newscaster asked us why we were up at 1am driving by the postoffice. Of course we gave sassy answers and my Father saw it on the news the next evening...not amused :)

Ever since I found macintax/turbotax I've been filing in February as it makes the unpleasant task a bit more bearable since you just plug in a bit of information and it spews out all the forms with how much you owe and where to send what forms.

Until 1955 taxes were due on the Ides of March instead of April! I'd have to wear a toga down to the post office and get a few friends to reenact the scene from Julius Caesar just to see if anyone would get the joke :) "Friends, Romans, Countrymen...can you spot me a few grand so the IRS doesn't take my house?!" There is a wonderful collection of taxation history at The Tax History Project so you can see just how long people have been paying taxes and just how easy we have it these days.

permalink Ω 15 April 2002, Helsinki

You always look cheap

I used to do typesetting and graphic design to supplement my meagre research stipend as I liked paying rent and eating on a regular basis which presented me with frequent opportunity to giggle at Engrish. I often helped the restaurants and other frequent offenders of the Engrish to correct the usage on their menus and whatnot. I don't have to work a 2nd or 3rd job anymore but everytime I pass by the cleaners down the street that has You never looked expensive as the slogan in their window I have to resist the urge to go by and tell them that it doesn't mean what they likely think it means, e.g. You always look cheap rather than You only look expensive. Why didn't the sign painter catch this? Or is this some kind of Chinese laundry code that says, Don't use this shop, take clothes to Mme. Cho's instead. She give good deal and clean clothes.?

permalink Ω 15 April 2002, Helsinki

Wannsee

For the 60th Anniversary of the Wannsee Meeting, Mark Roseman wrote The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution [ available in the US in late May ] to explore the meeting in more depth than the HBO movie Conspiracy could possibly attempt to do. It is a very thought provoking book since Hitler has always been at the center of the blame but the author argues that the Wannsee meeting was merely a codification of a process that was already underway and not under the direct order of Hitler. He has done enough research to support this besides it being far easier to believe that mass genocide was more complex a proposition than one man ordering thousands of zombie-like Germans to murder millions.

My interest in WWII has rarely strayed from signals intelligence and crypto but the discovery of the Wannsee protocol is interesting because it has prompted historians to return to their material and take a much closer look at the mechanics of how the incomprehensible and the unthinkable actually happened. Somthing of this magnitude couldn't have happened overnight and there were social, emotional and economic factors that influenced the eventual decision. It is frightening and real once the idea manifests itself that it was a gradual rather than a decisive action stemming from a clear directive which makes it far more elusive to define how it happened and, more importantly, how to prevent it from ever happening again.

permalink Ω 14 April 2002, Helsinki

The $50 Million Dollar Booty

A few months ago I wrote about the obese suing the fast food industry for making them fat. Well....it has begun. A woman is suing a snack food company for "emotional distress" due to an error on the nutrition label for Pirate's Booty.

NEW YORK (AP) — A woman is suing a snack food company for $50 million saying its label on Pirate's Booty corn and rice puffs foiled her diet. In her lawsuit, Meredith Berkman, 37, claims she suffered emotional distress because the snack contained three times more fat than its label advertised. Berkman said it caused her weight gain ... mental anguish, outrage and indignation.

Pirate's Booty, manufactured by Robert's American Gourmet Food, Inc., was recalled in January after the Good Housekeeping Institute found it contained 147 calories and 8.5 grams of fat, while its label said it contained only 120 calories and 2.5 grams of fat.

Fifty MILLION?! Damn, I better start chowing down so I too can find someone to sue for my resulting corpulence. I wonder what Jabba would do at a time like this.

permalink Ω 13 April 2002, Helsinki

Translatori Patri

As a recovering Catholic I'm pretty familiar with the Pontifical Encyclicals written in Latin but those only familiar with the Church through friends or Growing Up Catholic are probably pretty confused by the current crisis. Well, be confused no more, see the Papal Translator [ utterly brilliant animation ] to get a better understanding of his holy pontiffness and the Church.

permalink Ω 13 April 2002, Helsinki

Dot bomb icosahedron

All the Dot Bombs these days have left me with a large collection of useless business cards so I decided to do something with them to salute the bygone era; I made an icosahedron ornament. You can make your very own by following the steps and illustrations below. They make lovely parting gifts for the recently downsized or just a fun activity for the unemployed slacker with lots of time and a box of old business cards to play with.

Dot Bomb Icosahedron Project

Time: Appx. 1 hour
Cost: Free if you snag office supplies, about $3 if not.

I. Gather Supplies

1. Dot Bomb business cards or postcards
2. Elmer's paper craft glue gel
3. Small paintbrush
4. Exacto Knife
5. Craft/Exacto mat or cardboard square
6. Sharp Scissors
7. Ruler
8. Pen or pencil
9. Compass
10. Little binder clips or tiny paper clips
11. Hole Punch
12. String
13. Glitter Spraypaint [ optional ]

II. Marking the Cards

1. Set your compass to have a radius of 1cm to 2cm [ example has 2cm ].
2. Draw a circle with your compass on the business card or postcard.
3. Take the pointy end of the compass, place it on the circle you just drew and tick a mark with the pencil on the circle. Move the pointy end of the compass to that mark and repeat until you have six marks on the circle. Connect every other one to make a triangle. [ I'm aware this isn't exact but we aren't building rocket ships here, relax ]. I make this triangle out of heavy cardboard to make folding the edges faster and easier later since this step would only be done once.

III. Preparing the Discs

1. Take the scissor and cut out the circles you drew on the business cards. You will need 20 circles/discs for each isocohedron.
2. Fold flaps up for each of the 20 circles.
3. Take 5 circles, the paintbrush and the glue gel and glue two of the circles together by painting glue on one flap and holding them together. Add another to the side until you have a 5 sided top object like this one.
4. Make another top so that you have two and set them aside to dry.
5. With the gluebrush and 5 more circles, make a single row attaching them on 2 sides by gluing the flaps together.
6. Use your gluebrush and coat the top flaps with glue and attach this row gently to one of the tops. Use the little binder clips to help the glue set and dry in the right position.
7. Repeat the 2 previous steps with the remaining 5 circles and attach to the still available flaps on the ball-in-progress.
8. Pick up the other top piece and put glue on the 5 available flaps and attach it to the 5 available flaps on the ball-in-progress.
9. Let it dry for a little while.

IV. Finishing

1. Punch hole in a flap for hanging.
2. Put string through so that the ball can be hung.
3. Spray glitter paint on it for a nice sparkly touch.

permalink Ω 12 April 2002, Helsinki

Jinkies!

My 'land line' telephone is a honey pot for telemarketers so it's never answered and once a week or so I check the machine for anything potentially important. Last night I found out my dog either has a girlfriend or a stalker as someone sang a message to him asking where he is.

permalink Ω 12 April 2002, Helsinki

So cute yet too small

I have found the most adorable pair of bunny slippers at Garnet Hill [ item  6493 ]. Alas, they aren't made in the giant boat size that I need so my quest must continue. *pout*

permalink Ω 12 April 2002, Helsinki

Archiving history digitally

I'm not terribly enthused by the September 11th memorial plans but I ran across the 911 Digital Archive and thought it a nicely organised and beautifully presented archive of something that will be remembered for a long time to come. It is also serving as a learning experiment in digital archival techniques funded by the A.P.Sloan Foundation.

permalink Ω 12 April 2002, Helsinki

Rabelaisian delight

McSweeney's Internet tendency weekly List of lists is delightfully amusing. If you loved Gargantua and Pantagruel with its pages upon pages of lists, then you'll like McSweeney's :)

permalink Ω 12 April 2002, Helsinki

Raymond Carver

I went looking for a book tonight and found my old and tattered copy of Raymond Carver's All of Us causing me to become completely distracted. I was introduced to him in high school by one of my teachers who noticed I was fond of Checkov.

The Attic

Her brain is an attic where things
were stored over the years.

From time to time her face appears
in the little windows near the top of the house.

The sad face of someone who has been locked up
and forgotten about.

Romanticism

The nights are very unclear here.
But if the moon is full, we know it.
We feel one thing one minute,
something else the next.

His minimalist style in his peotry and prose demands a lot of the reader since the emotion is so condensed. The poem and the story are told in the volumes unspoken. If you aren't familiar with Raymond, go find a copy of his short stories and discover one of the best short story writers of the late 20th century.

permalink Ω 11 April 2002, Helsinki

conflictum librorum

I have a social disease -- I always carry a book with me no matter the destination or occasion whether it be a movie, a pub, dinner with friends, anywhere. Sometimes I carry two, one fiction and one non-fiction if I'm in a mood where either might be of more interest should the opportunity arise to read them.

I've never thought about seeing a shrink about it as I can usually discreetly hide my affliction by leaving the books in the car or hide them in a bag but I often feel a little twinge of guilt for having my cherished friends along with me for the evening. When I have a holiday from work I nearly always visit a bookshop and, depending on the lack of shelf space at home, I sometimes surreptitiously disguise my purchases by disposing of the shop bag and putting them on the shelf. Perhaps I have a clinical case of A Gentle Madness.

I felt a bit better today when I happened to read The Buying of Books by Carl S. Patton published in February 1922 where he freely admits to the same affliction I have come to know and love:

Dr. Johnson expressed the opinion that the best sort of book was a small one that one could 'carry to the fire'. I have sometimes improved upon this sentiment of Dr. Johnson, especially in the reading of German and French books. These books are often published in paper covers and sewed together apparently with a single thread. It is a matter of a few moments to split a five-hundred page volume into five parts of a hundred pages each, and to take each part to the printer's and have the wide margins trimmed down, until you have a pamphlet of handy size to carry in your pocket. Such pieces of books I have not merely 'carried to the fire' but carried in every conceivable place, reading them on the street-cars and while I was waiting my turn in the barber's or the dentist's chair. When I have thus been stealing a few minutes to read, I often envied the people who had more time to spare. But when I observed how many people have oceans of time, but carry no books in their pockets and spend no time reading, I have wondered whether we do not value even our highest opportunities better if we do not have too many of them. Thus I say to myself when, leaving my automobile at home because I cannot read while I drive it, I take my seat in an unobserved corner of the street-car, and pull from my pocket a copy, or even a fragment, of one of my books.

I used to commute via train and rarely, if ever, noticed anyone else reading a book though many would skim a paper in the morning and tap on a laptop. Most people stared idly out the window, even in the dark of winter. I live in fear of being somewhere without having a book when I could be reading.

I often assess how well I will get on with someone when I have a chance to visit their book collection or lack thereof. A friend of mine and I were talking recently about how he and his SO/wife are 'food compatible' which I thought was a rather profound observation since living with someone does require an agreeable match in the realm of cuisine. Someone who loves spicy variety and a late dinner probably won't live happily ever after with someone who only likes hot dogs at 5pm. After some thought I realise that my better half and I are 'book compatible' as not only do we order the same things from a menu usually [ leaving one of us to try and pick something else quickly ] we also tend to order and shop for the same books which leads to harmony on the bookshelf.

Jarkko laughs at my desire to open a bookshop in Helsinki but, given our affliction, it may save us money :)

permalink Ω 10 April 2002, Helsinki

And now, a word from our sponsor

According to TV is 75, TV and I share the same birthday though I'm not quite 75 this year. TV is a Virgo :) The History of the first 75 years of TV is really intriguing, especially how the TV itself has changed over the years much like the computer has evolved over time to become smaller and more easily integrated into our daily lives. The TV omnipresent in American life; from the laundromat to the pub, to the grocery store, to the shopping mall to the automobile.

The TV, like the computer, started life as a big, clunky, expensive, esoteric device that eventually became a fixture in every home. So many moments in the past century have been vicariously enjoyed by those tuning in to witness events that would otherwise have just been a front page story with a photo in a newspaper. Who doesn't remember watching the assasination of JFK, the lunar landing, Watergate, the Vietnam War, the Challenger explosion, Chernobyl, the falling of the Berlin Wall, the first shots of Desert Storm or the attack on the WTC and Pentagon? I hate the TV. I love the TV. It's difficult to articulate the affection for something that makes you feel like a vegetable, a passive voyeur. Love it or hate it but it was the printing press of the 20th Century and the internet is just a speedbump on the way to something even more revolutionary I suspect. The perfect popculture delivery system.

Tube: The Invention of Television is part of the Sloan Technology Series and is the best book to date on the history of television. A new book about Farnsworth and the early development of TV, The Boy Genius and the Mogul has just been published. Another pre-history, Please Stand By and The Sound Bite Society: Television and the American Mind [ companion website ] deal with more of the effects of TV on society.

permalink Ω 10 April 2002, Helsinki

Brush with greatness

I just had one of those "where are they now" moments when I started playing a new Petshop Boys CD and wondered what happened to a guy I knew in university. I casually put his name into Google and, damn, Bill Boll is a filmmaker along with Hickenlooper. I'm still in shock.

This was a guy who would paste the campus with goofy flyers on every billboard for his avant garde music shows with ribald titles. A number of friends I knew would go and drag me along, one evening Bill even asked me to be a go-go dancer since the pre-arranged person hadn't showed. I said no, but the mutual friends conspired, got me liquored up and I wound up in thigh-high purple boots and an orange and white spotted miniskirt hopping around to Bill's music.

One New Year's Eve, Bill threw a party and a few of us fortified our evening with Vitamin A to usher in the new. Hickenlooper stopped by as I recall but didn't stay. I didn't really know George but his father was the esteemed Shakespearean guest professor at my high school as well as a playwright of some acclaim. The loo was equipped with a tape recorder that night where guests were asked to record some profound thought in words while using the facilities. Listening to the tape after everyone had left was pretty hilarious too :) Bill's tie collection was also burned into my memory since they were outrageous and bright under the influence. There was freezing rain/sleet that night and around 3am we went out onto Lindell Boulevard and started skating around without coats or gloves as though we'd live forever. It is interesting what lingers in the memory nearly 20 years later.

A few years ago I ran into the ex-girlfriend of one of the guys in the crowd that I had a severe crush on and enquired about Bill among others. She told me he had gone out to California and was studying to be an Environmental Lawyer. Odd, I thought, but everyone seems to grow up, sell out and make a living eventually. Now that I know he's doing something creative and didn't bow to the maturity manifesto I'm pleased and a bit jealous. Bill, I salute you for sucking the marrow out of life just like I had always knew you would.

permalink Ω 8 April 2002, Helsinki

Catbert's revenge

In the US, health benefits are tied to your gainful and often full-time employment. Once every few years I actually can be arsed to find the mound of paperwork and the corresponding cards to use so I can go get my teeth drilled on or get a physical. Last week the eye centre actually took my card and found that I could have 50% of the cost of the glasses and the eye exam covered by my health insurance which was a revelation to me after all these years of never using it.

I must have jinxed the coverage as I was very enthused by this and prodded Jarkko to go get his vision checked and see about new glasses. This morning the eye centre called and mentioned that the insurance coverage was no longer valid. Half-jokingly I asked if he had been fired on Friday and just forgot to mention this detail over the weekend. Well, apparently some mass paperwork fiasco is at foot here and we both are employed full-time yet suddenly find ourselves without any medical coverage. To say that I'm annoyed is an understatement. This is the same HR department who had no information the day I and others were informed that we were now working for HP instead of Nokia.

I mean, why should they care if you die in the ER on a Saturday night due to invalid health insurance and other people with valid health insurance are ahead of you? It happens.

permalink Ω 8 April 2002, Helsinki

A Twist of Lemony

As a result of a series of unfortunate events, Lemony Snicket has an Unauthorized Autobiography hitting the bookstores early in May.

permalink Ω 8 April 2002, Helsinki

Stock up on Depends

For years the data has been clear but the dirty little topic that noone wants to talk about is Social Security and the impending crisis due to an aging baby boom population. Politicians keep talking about lower taxes and spend the SS 'surplus' without regard to this statistical certainty and people are willing to believe that somehow it will all be taken care of by the time they retire. Massachusetts, A.K.A. Taxachusetts, has one of the highest rates of taxation in the 50 states yet even after years of economic boom we are in severe deficit with politicians still telling people the fairy tale of lower taxes they want to hear.

We scoff at the Scandinavian countries for having such high taxation but they not only have health care, retirement and the best education on the planet, they also have been aware of this problem for years and are taking steps to help alleviate the problem before it arrives. I fear it is already too late for the slow bureaucratic machine that only moves quickly when there are bombs involved to address this situation before it is a crisis. Retirement will be a thing of the past for the working class.

permalink Ω 8 April 2002, Helsinki

Nova on the WTC

Nova has a special, Why the Towers Fell, that will broadcast on 30 April so clear your calendar now as I'm sure it will be fascinating.

permalink Ω 8 April 2002, Helsinki

Sie Wundermoosen

Font Checker is essential software for the OS X unicode hacker. It's all about the Dutch moose from Maine :)

permalink Ω 7 April 2002, Helsinki

Fight Global Warming

Arbor Day is coming soon so check the date your state will celebrate it this year, buy a single or a bunch of trees and plant them. With the exception of the apple tree that got zapped by lightning when I was living in the UK [ Dad took photos to prove it to me ] all of the trees my father and I planted for Arbor Day every year are still alive and rather large :)

permalink Ω 7 April 2002, Helsinki

A different kind of getty

Whenever I add a new CPAN Mirror to the CPAN Mirror Database I usually have to go look up the latitutde and longitude for the entry. I have come to adore the Getty Geographic Thesaurus for finding the coordinates as well as random factoids about the location.

permalink Ω 7 April 2002, Helsinki

Spring Forward

I've always been late to rise and late to bed so "Daylight Saving Time" or "Summer Time" has often left me a bit miffed since everything in the US seems to revolve around the people who are early to rise and are early to bed. After 9pm it's nearly impossible to find a restaurant or shops that are open unless you live in a city centre. This appears absurd considering we are not an agrarian society that rises with the sun to tend the crops anymore, but makes more sense in the energy conservation rationale.

Timekeeping has been a bit of historical curiosity and contention throughout the ages and there are several books which treat the subject quite well; History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders, Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time, Calendrical Calculations and The Oxford Companion to the Year.

permalink Ω 7 April 2002, Helsinki

Bill Gates Hacked

Considering how many people didn't get the CPAN April Fool's CJAN joke [ we got about 100 or more email with "You've Been Hacked!!!!" warnings ], I found the article about Bill Gates falling for a Canadian radio show prank hilarious. :) Maybe AI professors should invest more time in developing an Artificial Sense of Humour for geeks.

permalink Ω 5 April 2002, Helsinki

Have wireless, will travel

The Economist has a cogent article, Making Wi-Fi Pay, in the latest issue.

So is the stage set for a repeat of the boom in fixed-line Internet access? Not quite. One problem is that Wi-Fi networks rely on existing high-speed fixed connections to the Internet. Wi-Fi's future thus depends on cheap, ubiquitous broadband, which has yet to materialise. Furthermore, sharing a connection is frowned upon by broadband-service providers, though some providers are thinking of introducing pricing plans that explicitly allow connection-sharing over Wi-Fi. Another problem is that commercial use of unlicensed spectrum is prohibited in some countries.

The US is years behind the rest of the planet in wireless phone service so it's interesting to see the interest and the lag in Wi-Fi as well. It's curious to see the overnight popularity of wireless as I remember Negroponte lauding his wireless home nearly 5 years ago. Of course, the price for wireless technology then was exhorbitantly priced and now you can get a home wireless gateway for the price of dinner and a movie.

Cost drives the mass market and you have to ask if it can be profitable for the providers and still meet the almighty price point for the consumer.

permalink Ω 5 April 2002, Helsinki

Go Card, Go!

I love the free postcards available in some clubs as they are often nicely designed and make good bookmarks. The rates for the postcards are pretty reasonable as well. It would be interesting to advertise Perl this way, especially since Jon Orwant mailed all the TPJ subscription confirmations on these postcards when TPJ was just getting going. :)

permalink Ω 4 April 2002, Helsinki

MT Upgrade

I upgraded to MT 2.0 tonight in spite of being unable to find the correct distribution at first [ reading helps :) ] and it's lovely. Highly recommended to my fellow MT users.

permalink Ω 4 April 2002, Helsinki

PHB Porn

Managers masterbate to this sort of team building IT Anthem singing. Horrifying. The mere suggestion of it sent the Wannabe PHB here in the office on a desperate hunt for the Nokia and HP songs. He'll probably write one at home tonight to impress someone who gives a damn :)

permalink Ω 4 April 2002, Helsinki

Going Somewhere?

The Global Gazetteer is a directory of 2.8 Million cities and towns around the world. Don't leave home without it.

permalink Ω 4 April 2002, Helsinki

Users are people?

Gerry McGovern would really like for the computing world to stop calling people users.

The phrase 'user-friendly' should never have had to be invented. It implies that technology is inherently hostile and that a new discipline – usability – had to be invented to make it friendlier. After all, we don't refer to cars as 'driver-friendly.' We don't refer to bicycles as 'cyclist-friendly.' We don't refer to chairs as 'bum-friendly.'

Deep in the heart of much technology is an antipathy and contempt for people. Many computer pioneers saw people as inherently stupid, with computers having a logical purity. The view was that science and technology should strive to replace and automate the things that people did.

[....]

So, let's dump this word 'user.' And if you can't come up with a better word for people, just call them people.

I do have better words for "user" but I'm generally not allowed to use them in polite company. :) It is hard to discern if he's joking or not.

A few years back I bought a couple of the Dealing With Users O'Really t-shirts as the neanderthal head really captures the essence of the user. Grod bang keyboard until Grod make box work!

permalink Ω 4 April 2002, Helsinki

Mondo Global Warming Condo

It is nearly 1 mile long, 750 feet wide, 25 stories high and will circumnavigate the globe every 2 years. Oil tanker? No, a luxury cruise ship condo. Since Antarctica is melting, I'd say this is a damned good investment.

But the Freedomship is just the tip of the iceberg :)

Let Residensea give you The USS World who will embark on it's maiden voyage on 2 May 2002.

So, if you have a few million euros to burn and want to avoid the rush before the flood, you've got lots of options. Well, unless you're a land lubber like myself as I would have a hard time deciding whether to drown or board the ship. I blame the Poseidon Adventure.

permalink Ω 3 April 2002, Helsinki

We need dirty rubbish

Found Magazine. I shred all personal and business paper for the rubbish and so should you lest you be next weeks 'find'. I'm not sure which is worse; Time, CNN and the rest of the media written for a 6th grade reading level or the net making anything newsworthy, including trash.

permalink Ω 2 April 2002, Helsinki

Eye C U

Before getting my new glasses I resigned to get my eyes checked and found that I'm not going blind, but I do have a prescription that is far too strong. The cool part was the apparatus the doctor used to determine this as he had me look at two eye charts, one in red and one in green. If the green was in sharper/bolder focus it meant I was overcorrected, and the red meant I was undercorrected. A clever trick with light wavelengths :) What a relief since I thought I would have to get bifocals and had visions of going blind like a fellow sysadmin did in the last few years. I was given a magnet with the above design and recommend that if it has been 2 years or more [ 3.5 in my case ] since your last exam, find a good doctor and go get them checked as your vision doesn't improve with age any more than your soft tissue body parts get firmer.

permalink Ω 2 April 2002, Helsinki

AKEZ QFXB EFUL JW

I have been waiting a seeming eternity for Enigma, the movie about Bletchley Park to finally be released after being delayed last Fall [ 3 May for those of us in Cambridge ].

I'm hoping they aren't going to turn it into a vehicle for Kate Winslet and tell the story as it deserves to be told with less focus on sex and Turing and more on the scores of women who did much of the decrypting tedium, the guys from Huts 5 and 6, and the heroic efforts of the Polish to solve and get a working model of the enigma to Bletchley, without which there would be no story. I am likely to be disappointed as there's nothing like a sexy movie star or a popular recipient of myth like Turing to distort history.

Cryptologia is a wonderful journal that often has articles on the Enigma and there's even a Perl module, Crypt::Enigma, though not historically accurate, available to play with.

permalink Ω 2 April 2002, Helsinki

The Amazon.com conflict

It used to be that I had to get my ass off the sofa and actually venture out to the bookshops for my vice but Amazon makes it too easy to find everything I'm looking for and a whole lot of other stuff that I hadn't thought of before. Jarkko and I now have nearly every flat surface in the house piled with books and eye each other suspiciously when we hear the too familiar screeching of the UPS truck arriving at our front door to deliver even more books.

I try not to shop for more books these days but Amazon is a cruel mistress, taunting me with new selections it knows I won't resist like Elvis Costello's new album When I Was Cruel, What Just Happened: A Chronicle From the Electronic Frontier, The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business and Society and A Brief History of the Future since I have a taste for tormented English musicians and the history of technology.

I think we need a house where all the walls are covered in bookshelves :)

permalink Ω 2 April 2002, Helsinki

Maybe smaller is better!

I'll never forget seeing the stars in crisp focus on the way home from the optometrist when I got my first pair of glasses. They were big, dorky and heavy but I could see things for a change so I wore them all the time unlike my older sister who needed them more than I did and often didn't wear them. I tried contacts for a brief time and when one ripped on my eye after driving all night to Key West, I flicked it out the window and haven't gone back.

I purchased the first pair of glasses I ever liked after seeing them on the local NAACP president at a dinner one night and asked him where he bought them. Of course, this would be the first pair I chose on my own without my parents. Over the years I've worn a number of frames but I've noticed that the lenses are significantly smaller than 20 years ago. My latest pair of glasses nearly omits the frame entirely so pretty soon I suspect I'll be wearing a monocle. :)

I've developed a theory that Macintosh users wear small frame/lens glasses and PC/Wintel users wear large frame/lens glasses which I will attribute to the higher value placed on aesthetics by Macintosh owners. Note the difference in eyewear on Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. I should start collecting data and see if there is any real correlation :)

permalink Ω 1 April 2002, Helsinki

Oh, you mean this network?

This afternoon Radar Riccardo calls me in a panic, "our box is down! our box is down!" so I look for the system shell on my desktop and, sure enough, I got squat for connectivity. I grab my laptop and have a look at the console in the freezing lab where it appears to have lost its network connectivity. Odd, nothing has changed today as I've been busy shopping for stuff on the internet all day. I wiggle all the obvious connectors and go bellow for the network guy whom we'll call Sparky.

<ME>Sparky! Anything up with our fine network today?
<SPARKY>No, why?
<ME>I have a box that claims it has no network and, considering it isn't sentient, I believe it.
[ ...we walk back into the lab..]
<SPARKY> [ looking at box and cable ] Nope, looks fine.
[ scowl ... reboot and fsck box takes about 30 mins... ]
<ME>Yo Mama, the box is sticking to it's story.
<SPARKY>I'm telling ya, it's not the network!
<ME>I'll bet good money the box ain't lying, c'mon and we'll trace the cable in the wiring cabinet.
[ ...digging through a mound of cabling and...lo and behold..the other end of the cable isn't plugged into anything! ...]
<ME>You know, doesn't Cisco have a console where you can see if shit is plugged in or not?
<SPARKY>Yeah, but, that shouldn't have happened.
<ME>Well, lots of things shouldn't happen, like me working here for example, but when I bother you about the network there is a near 100% chance that it's your bailiwick and not mine...and when it's Radar Riccardo, I am not going to be happy about sentient network cabling popping out of their sockets.
<SPARKY>Hmmm, well...
<ME>Here, I've got duct tape in my desk, let's tape the fucker in there as I do not want this to happen again.

One of these days I'm going to get a real job with real professionals again and I will either die of joy or sob from having to do real work for a change.

permalink Ω 1 April 2002, Helsinki

Motor On, Wayne!

When I lived in the UK I had a snappy little Spyder but always secretly lusted for a Mini and now the Mini has come to the US! Sadly, I'm leaving the country at the end of the year and will have to content myself with configuring my dream car online. They also have a series of adorable commercials for the launch. :)

permalink Ω 1 April 2002, Helsinki

Dr. Evil's Secret

Why is it that every time I see Nad's I think of Dr. Evil and his shorn scrotum?

permalink Ω 1 April 2002, Helsinki