Author: matthew

It turns out your momma was right: it’s generally safe to eat food that has been on the floor for five seconds or less.

It turns out your momma was right: it’s generally safe to eat food that has been on the floor for five seconds or less.

And for your dose of morning humor, here’s my favorite snopes story for the day:

The Kern County, California, Sheriff’s Department orders plain white patrol units and has the graphics applied locally. In this case: What they ordered . . . was not quite what they got.

This car was driven for 1 week before an officer noticed what the graphics company employee did on the passenger side of the car. The employee did this on his last day working for the graphics company before he retired.

Read more at snopes.com…

Thought you’d be interested to note that Tim Clarke stopped in 🙂 Check out his comment at http://barnson.org/node/view/432#1448.

Penjacking – Safety alert: Kryptonite brand locks can be picked with ordinary Bic pens. [Snopes]

Yep, it turns out the vaunted “Kryptonite” locks, which I’ve been using on my bicycles since 1992, can be easily picked with an ordinary Bic pen. I always thought they were excellent locks, and very difficult to cut even with bolt cutters.

Heh, there’s this old bike lock that’s been attached to a fence across the street from the ZCMI center in downtown Salt Lake City for the last three years. Maybe I should try this out on it and rid the city of a minor eyesore?

How many Yahoo Group Members does it take to change a light bulb?

1 to change the light bulb but after posting the light bulb story…

• 14 to share similar experiences of changing light bulbs and how the light bulb could have been changed differently
• 7 to caution about the dangers of changing light bulbs
• 27 to point out spelling/grammar errors in posts about changing light bulbs
• 53 to flame the spell checkers
• 41 to correct spelling/grammar flames
• 6 to argue over whether it’s “lightbulb” or “light bulb”
• … another 6 to condemn those 6 as anal-retentive
• 2 industry professionals to inform the group that the proper term is “lamp”
• 27 to post URL’s where one can see examples of different light bulbs
• 14 to post that the URL’s were posted incorrectly and then post the corrected URL’s
• 12 to post to the group that they will no longer post because they cannot handlethe light bulb controversy
• 4 to suggest that posters request the light bulb FAQ
• 44 to ask what is a “FAQ”
• 4 to say “didn’t we go through this already a short time ago?”
• 143 to say “do a Google search on light bulbs”
• 1 forum lurker to respond to the original post 6 months from now and start it all over again

For those who hadn’t caught the news, it turns out that beer is good for you. In a recent long-term study, scientists found that consumption of one bottle of beer per day “reduces your chances of contracting cataracts or atherosclerosis (narrowing of the arteries caused by the buildup of plaque) by 50 per cent.”

Yep, you heard that right: you’re half as likely to get hardened arteries and cataracts if you drink a bottle a day.

Don’t get your hopes up too high, though. The study also found that drinking a second bottle dramatically reduced the benefit, and drinking three or more a day adversely affected these same risk factors.

I guess I’ll take my chances with hard arteries and cataracts by making other improvements in my diet, though. I hate the smell and taste of beer.

So a friend (thanks, Phil!) just invited me to join Gmail.

In case you haven’t heard about this, Gmail is a web-based email service offered by Google. They pay for the service by delivering targetted ads determined by scanning the content of the email message. They give you a GIGABYTE of storage. They also filter junk mail pretty well.

People have made many tools to allow you to access your gmail account in ways the developers didn’t intend. You can use it is a POP3 account, and relay your mail through it using your gmail credentials. You can mount it as a filesystem in GNU/Linux, even, using that 1GB as free, private, online storage.

The downsides?

1. I can’t read my mail offline. Not to fear, though; I’ve already begun hacking on offline IMAP to see if I can figure out how to integrate it into existing Python libraries and synchronize to my gmail account. That way I can run Mutt when I’m not connected, and dig through archives even if I don’t have an active Internet connection. This may take a while, though; I’m no stellar Python hacker.
2. Targetted ads. You have no privacy. I guess I’m getting used to it, and am beginning to use the phrase “never send in an email or post in a weblog anything you wouldn’t like to see stapled to your resume”.
3. The interface is slick, but it takes some getting used to. I discovered that Gmail supports keyboard shortcuts, though, and that should dramatically speed up my data entry.
4. It’s still Beta. Which means it’s in testing, and your data is not guaranteed. No telling what they’re going to do with the data once they’re out of beta, though I suspect it would be public relations suicide for Google to nuke everybody’s accounts when they go live.
5. I can’t see that there’s any kind of Bayesian filtering built in, but it might be there and I just don’t see it.
6. I like the idea of having multiple folders where my messages live. It makes tracking conversations in mailing lists much more intuitive, and I can ignore them for days or weeks at a time. Gmail instead uses the idea of “labels” rather than folders; you can label messages certain ways, and they become “virtual” folders by using Google’s search engine. I’ll have to see if I get used to it.
7. No dynamic signature creation. I may have to hack myself another Python script to automatically change my signature every few minutes. It’s become a trademark of my email messages that I include a brief quip at the end of each message. I use the UNIX “fortune” program to generate these on my FreeBSD box, and use the Mutt mailer as my front-end at the moment.
8. No PGP or GPG integration. Until I have figured out the solution to digitally signing all my messages, gmail will be a non-starter for my active email usage. It’s too easy to spoof people’s email addresses, and I want “plausible deniability” — if I didn’t sign it, one is left either believing I intentionally didn’t sign something, or that it wasn’t me. Having had my email address spoofed in the past, I love using GPG to digitally sign my messages. Heck, it also works as good as a physical signature for certain documents.
9. Spammers are already abusing it. Yep, they are trying to nail people with gmail accounts, and trying to pretend to be from gmail themselves when in fact they are using some anonymous relay in Brazil to attempt to dump their wares on a gullible populace. Have I mentioned before how much I despise spammers who lie in trying to sell their stuff? I have a new respect for spammers who send their mail from SPF-registered servers, using legitimate email addresses. Many of them need to hide their personal information to prevent anti-spammers from abusing them, but if the return email address is legitimate, and they use a server registered to their business so that people who simply hate unsolicited mail can block them, well, that’s OK, you know? It’s the ones who lie and spoof mail addresses that drive me crazy — which represents about 99% of spam I receive.

Well, that’s about the size of it. Any of you have a gmail account yet? And if you could have an ideal email account, what would it be like?

I finally found a web site that reflects my political views this election season: Republicans for John Kerry. I’m naturally slightly conservative (well, I’m a moderate, really, liberal on some thingsand conservative on othes), but this election season I’m voting Democrat. Unfortunately, this has far more to do with George Bush’s decision-making than John Kerry’s ability.

My gut feeling is that four more years of George Bush will lead the U.S. further into empire-building, lashing out at real and imagined enemies until, overburdened with debt and straining for lack of resources, we crumble into economic ruin in another long depression.

The policy of pre-emptive wars, with policies in place for our country to be responsible for enforcing South African trade routes, and the prospect of war with China… I just don’t want to see more of this. I think we need someone more sensitive to international issues in the White House. Someone who’s willing to admit he was wrong. Someone who will surround himself with advisors that represent average America, rather than the upper echelons of corporate tyranny.

Kerry’s not a perfect match, but I’m voting for him because, well, he’s better than the alternative. Unfortunately, historically no incumbent president who has received more than a 6% real boost in the polls after convention has gone on to lose the election. Which makes the prospects of a regime change rather bleak.

So, if you’re willing, who do you plan to vote for, and why? I welcome disagreeing opinions.

My first realization that my eyes were not completely perfect came at the age of seventeen. There was a lunar eclipse, and I had set my telescope up on its tripod in the back yard of our home in Montgomery County, MD.

My friend, Steve Pratt, was hanging out at our house that night. I focussed my low-power telescope perfectly on the moon, and marvelled at the detail even this modest device could muster.

I had been an astronomy buff since I was a small child, and could easily locate the common constellations in the night sky. I had a mental calendar of all the regular meteor showers, and for several years had pretty faithfully gone out to watch for at least one night of each shower. In those days, even that close to Washington, D.C. we had a clear view of the night sky, with few streetlights to glare out the heavens.

I gestured to Steve to come over. “Just look at that,” I said, “pretty cool, huh? You can watch the eclipse obscure the moon.”

Steve leaned over and peered through the diminutive telescope. “It’s fuzzy,” he replied.

I bent down to check. “No, it’s perfectly clear,” I responded. “But adjust it, maybe your eyes are different than mine.”

Steve adjusted the focus of the telescope and made the appropriate noises of awe and wonder. I could tell that he didn’t think it was nearly as cool as I did, but I didn’t care.

However, the knowledge that he’d had to adjust the focus troubled me. A few months later I went and saw the eye doctor.

“This is what I call a ‘nuisance prescription’,” he creaked in an ancient, wheezy voice. “Your eyes are fine. There’s a slight astigmatism, and I’ll give you some glasses to help you read signs when you’re driving at night or using your telescope, but I wouldn’t advise wearing them all the time. You’ll just get dependent on them, when really, your eyes are almost perfectly normal.”

Thus I received my first pair of glasses. They had bright red frames, flecked with black, and were “schoolboy style” — covering a large chunk of my face when I wore them. I thought they looked cool, but had a strong suspicion that nobody else did.

Well, after a decade and a half, and many lost glasses later, I finally decided to try out contact lenses. Over the years, my minor prescription has gotten slowly, but steadily, worse. There’s a sliding scale of vision, from -5.00 through +5.00 (actually, it goes beyond that, but past the fives you’re pretty much legally blind without lenses). If you’re in the negatives, you’re nearsighted; your eyes focus light a little too well, and the focal point is in front of your retina. If you’re in the positives, you’re farsighted, and your eyes focus light on a point behind your retina.

Anyway, my right eye is -1.00, while my left is -0.75 now. Something contacts don’t seem to be able to do, while glasses can, is correct for severe astigmatism, or unevenness of the pupil or retina. For that, you need glasses, with a certain offset to handle the irregularity. I have a slight astigmatism, but contacts improve my vision enough that the minor fuzziness around the edges of some letters on a chalkboard doesn’t hurt much.

It’s been an interesting adventure, though. The day I received my initial prescription — this past Thursday — it took me over a half hour to get the darn things in and out the first time. Getting them out isn’t too big a deal. You just slide the lens slightly off the pupil, and then it’s easy to pinch it off your eye. But putting it on! What a chore that was. I kept getting bubbles, and it wouldn’t stick. Ick.

I wore them through the afternoon on Thursday, but discovered by the evening, my eyes were actually really tired. I think it’s because they’ve become so accustomed to focussing at a certain point, that having my eyes constantly corrected is an adjustment. Also, I could feel the lenses in my eyes the first day. I could tell they were there, and every time I blinked, I’d feel them shift around. Today, I’m not noticing them, but I also bought some “artificial tears” to put in to help make sure my eyes stay wet. We live in an extremely dry climate, which has been hell on my eyes for years (lots of redness). Maybe having contact lenses will force me to actually take care of my eyes for the first time 🙂

Anyway, that’s it for my adventure (so far) in contact lenses. It’s something new, and I’m already eyeing the tinted lenses with a little greed. I mean, I could be brown-eyed tomorrow, and violet-eyed the next day! How cool would that be?

Well, probably not cool to anybody else, but cool to me.