Better than a cup of gold

One would have to assume that the accompanying music to this sculpture of Jesus on the cross made out of chocolate would be Tom Waits.

Makes me feel so good inside
Only a chocolate Jesus can keep me satisfied

read more

Choice is skeletal in everybody's life

conversation with some coworkers a few days ago:

coworker #1: Hey, we're going to Gus' for lunch. Do you want anything?
me: how much are the pretzel sticks?
coworker #2: 3 for $1.20.
me: here's a buck, I only want one.
coworker #2: but it's 3 for $1.20. I'll spot you the twenty cents.
me: No no, I only want one. Frankly I'm too fat to be eating three of those.
coworker #3: are you trying to lose weight?
me: Not really, I'm just claiming to be trying to lose weight. Much less effort and I get the same results.

read more

I'm sittin here callin from Tennessee

Making snide comments to the IVR system when trying to call your health insurance company (or anyone else really) simply prolongs the hassle. Don't do it. You might end up tempted to throw your phone down the stairwell before you get through to an actual person.

read more

We don't need no education

So Mayor Slay got his way. He's one step closer to his goal of driving the middle class out of the city. The city schools have lost their accreditation. Which means for the next six years (at least) all the kids who graduate from the city schools will be unable to get into college. Whoohoo! Victory for... well, Slay.

And his good buddy Rick Sullivan, of McBride and Son construction, who has no education background is going to be in charge. At least now McBride will get all those city school building contracts they've been trying to get. I'm sure there will be no favoritism there. He also doesn't live in the city, so he really has zero incentive to make the schools perform any better, as long as his company gets the contracts for fixing the buildings.

This is incredibly frustrating, because in the years I've been following the city schools it seems that the only people who actually care about the students are the people who keep getting shut out. Slay couldn't get the school board to rubber stamp everything he wanted, so he made sure the state would sideline them and put his hand picked team in. I might not have a problem with Slay had ever showed the slightest bit of interest in the best interest of the students. The only thing he appears interested in is power, and presumably the sweetheart deals he can give all his pals as a result of that power.

Disgusting.

read more

Who are the brain police

listen to a lot of podcasts. Primarily they are music podcasts (coverville, indiefeed, KEXP) along with science, politics, and culture oriented ones. One thing that I've noticed on podcasts that are from radio shows is that there is sometimes a jump in the recording where it's clear that something has been cut out. Since they are radio shows I know it's not due to profanity (thanks for doing my thinking for me, FCC!). I figured it had something to do with legal liability for something.

The only BBC podcast I currently subscribe to is the Now Show from BBC4, which I *highly* recommend. Even if you don't know the people they're referring to a lot of the time (british politicians and entertainers) it's still hilarious.

Whenever they play something on the show that they can't legally play on the podcast, the podcast has one of the hosts saying something like


I particularly like the way they make it clear that it is because of restrictive licensing. In the same vein that I always expand DRM as Digital Restrictions Management, because the technology does not manage rights, it restricts them.

read more

It's gonna be a fantastic day

I arrived at work today to find that our weekly two hour status meeting had been pre-empted by a meeting with the users on requirements and timelines. A meeting which I do not need to attend. It's shaping up to be a good day.

I was chastised yesterday for my lack of posts in the month of March. My response was "I have two types of blog posts: the ones I have time to write, and the ones worth writing. And rarely the two shall meet."

Note that I had time to write this one.

Update: Damn I'm good. Within 2 minutes of posting about how great today would be, I went to shake up my frappucino bottle it dawned on me mid shake that the I'd already taken the lid off. Now my monitor, keyboard, wrist rest, sweater, pants, hands, and most of the paper on my desk are sticky. Bite me.

read more

Your diet will crush me

I've finally bitten the bullet and tried once again to use an RSS aggregator to simplify my life. It might work this time. I've opted for Google Reader, because it integrates nicely into Google Homepage. So whenever I hit the home button I've got all my blog/news update along with gmail and calendar. It's the digital dashboard that tech visionaries have been promising since the mid 90's. For my regular daily reading, easily 80% is only one click from my browser default page. Instead of opening 15 different sites in tabs in the morning to see which have updated with what I simply look at the list of items and plow through them much quicker. It's all about simplification.

The only media feed I have is BBC. I was trying to figure out why I made the decision to only include area specific sites (macworld, idolator, blogs, reddit) with no general daily news source. Listening to the Skeptics Guide podcast on the way to work it clicked.

Daily news media makes you stupider. For local news, sports, and general politics and business news (read: press releases) they're fine. For anything that require the slightest bit of nuance or complexity you are going to be dumber about a topic after reading about it in the newspaper or watching it on the evening news.

The story that brought this to clarity was about a recent study comparing four popular diets. The media has concluded that the Atkins diet is the best of all possible diets (again). Christopher Gardner, the lead author, was on Science Friday and his first statement was that the media had blown the report all out of proportion to the actual results. He said this was too short term a study to draw any significant conclusions about any particular diet. The more important point to take away was probably that ALL of the diets were hard to follow in every day life. He also noted that for the people who followed the diets most closely, there was no significant difference in the results regardless of which diet they were on. Finally he said that there needs to be more research into long term impact of diet plans, as there is much criticism of all diets from the medical community. He'd like to do a study where rather than pick a fad diet, they put people on one of three configurations of diets where the study provides them with high quality proteins, fats, and carbs in various balances to see the impact when quality and quantity of foods are controlled for. He did also point out that for all it's other problems, Atkins' greatest strength is that it prohibits refined sugars which is most likely the main reason it is effective in short term weight loss.

This is one of the less egregious examples I've encountered, it's just ...

read more

No time, never got a thing to wear

Things I Would Have Blogged If I'd Had Time Yesterday

First off, this sounds like a category on Whad'ya Know.

Idiocy of the operations branch

Pain of using 'Enterprise' software because it has the word 'Enterprise'
in it with no other discernable value over the old software

Likelihood of being fired for answering a stupid question with a
smartass answer

Why I think it's perfectly OK for people to talk on their cell phones in
restaurants, bars, on the street, etc etc. Particularly if they use
headsets. To summarize: the more people think everyone they encounter on
a day to day basis is completely insane, the better the world is.

My unhealthy obsession with The Amazing Race

The end of Penn Radio :(

Fun experiments in sleep deprivation

Kat is not naked

read more

I will never forget

This picture just needs a traffic counter box added to it. Never forget.

read more